tl;dr
Between April 5th - 7th I visited PyCon Austria 2025. The conference itself went very well with great talks, workshops and networking opportunities. I also met some colleagues and people I've got to know during EuroPython 2024 in Prague. I also gave a lightning talk.
PyCon Austria 2025 is over. It was nice to be part of a Python event in Austria after so long. The last time I attended a Python conference in Austria was back in 2019 and 2018 when it was called PyDays Vienna
The conference itself went very well with great talks, workshops and networking opportunities. The organization team did a fantastic job, and the talks had a good mix between beginner and intermediate level topics.
The Venue was located at the University of Applied Sciences in Eisenstadt, and I was quite amazed by the Architecture of the building.
Opening Party
I arrived at about 18:30 and joined the opening party. There were many people there already and we all enjoyed drinks together. We talked about the upcoming days and exchanged ideas on how Python is used, what are the challenges, what the future holds for us as developers and more. I also met some familiar faces from EuroPython 2024 in Prague.
I also received some nice stickers from the organizers that are themed for the conference, and that I already stuck on my laptop.
Horst Jens, one of the main organizers of the conference, also convinced me to put my name on the list for the Lightning Talk session.
Conference Days
The conference lasted two days, there were several tracks running parallel with sessions and workshops. The main topics being social, web, data and AI. You can find the full schedule on the official website.
I think the sessions could have been organized better, especially regarding the breaks, this would encourage people to talk to each other and exchange knowledge. There was a get together at the end of the first day, where I used the opportunity to talk to my colleagues and also meet some new people, most of them appeared to be speakers at the conference.
Here are the ones that caught my attention:
Day 1:
- Alex Shershebnev: Developing production-ready apps in collaboration with AI Agents
- Olena Kutsenko: Building agent systems with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink
- Sara Jakša: Regex is magic
- Ralf Schlatterbeck: Experiments with Automatic Music Composition
- Lightning Talks - I started this session by presenting my lightning talk on
GitLab Mirrors, where I demonstrated how to set up and maintain efficient repository mirroring between GitLab instances.
Day 2:
- Aivars Kalvān: QuerySet.explain(): make it make sense
- Clemens Bachmann: WebTigerPython: Unleashing Python's Full Potential in the Browser
- Christophe Bornet: Building Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI applications with LangChain
- Petr Simecek: From ML Miracles to AI Trash: Taming the Bullshit in LLMs
- Raul Pino: Red Teaming Latent Spaces & Protecting LLM apps
- Lightning Talks
All talks were well presented and engaging. My personal highlight however was the talk by Raul Pino, especially since I work with LLMs myself. He had several demonstrations of how to attack LLMs and how to protect applications using LLMs.
The City of Eisenstadt
I was a bit skeptical about the city, especially considering the fact that it has only ~16k inhabitants. But I was pleasantly surprised by the city and its surroundings. It is a beautiful place with lots of greenery and parks. The city center has beautiful buildings and architecture, and there are several small streets that offer a lot of charm.
The main attraction of the city is the castle, which also has a very nice park around it. Contrary to Google Maps, the park was open also after 17:00, so I was able to make a quick tour around after the conference ended.
For the size of the city I was also impressed by the number of restaurants and cafes. Here are some that I could recommend:
Conclusion
Overall, I had a great experience attending PyCon Austria 2025. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet other Python enthusiasts and learn new things.