PyCon US 2026 Recap

I just spent seven days in Long Beach, California, for PyCon US 2026, the biggest Python conference in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Many of the people behind the language (including the creator, Guido van Rossum), packages, frameworks, and the community were there, enjoying two days of tutorials, three days of talks, two days of sprints, and lots in between.

This picture is from the Django community booth, and if you look closely, you’ll see Guido himself, two Django Fellows, a Django President, Django Board members, DjangoCon organizers, EuroPython organizers, and more.

Long Beach is a fantastic venue for a conference: good weather, on the water, excellent food, and a large nearby airport. I had a six-hour flight from Boston on Thursday.

Here are some more photos to get a feel for the place.

The Queen Mary is an old ocean liner that is now a hotel and venue. A good friend was married on it a number of years ago. It now sits permanently in the harbor.

There is also a cool bridge downtown that lets you walk from the beach area towards the convention center and main streets.

And even a sign with sister cities.

Thursday

I arrived on Thursday in time for the evening opening reception, though I wish I had arranged my schedule to also attend the Education Summit earlier in the day.

At the check-in booth, I picked up my official badge. Custom ribbons are quite the thing at these events; I only had one for “Sponsor” initially, though.

We had a full team at the PyCharm/JetBrains booth, including Developer Advocates (like me), product managers, marketing, and engineers. For years, PyCharm has been a big sponsor of Python: attending PyCon US and EuroPython, running the annual Python survey, supporting frameworks like Django, and so on.

A shoutout to my colleague Paul Everitt, who was presented with the PSF Community Service Reward, a well-deserved honor given his decades of work to advance Python.

There is always a lot of excitement at the opening reception, and this year was no exception. Our booth had several demos around new AI features and an AI agent sticker leaderboard (more on that shortly).

Here is my colleague, Kristel, demoing a Python game to showcase some PyCharm features.

Following the reception, PyCharm hosted a small gathering at the nearby Breakers hotel and I had the chance to chat with engineers from Spotify, Pydantic, and other companies about all things, especially AI and how it is being used and misused in professional settings.

Friday

The next morning, it was up early to work at the sponsor booth starting at 7:30am. We had two book signings with both Stefanie Molin and Eric Matthes.

One of our goals this year was to take as many videos as possible of attendees discussing their work, whether or not they use PyCharm. Alex from the JetBrains team was busy the whole time taking photos and filming interviews. Here he is with me and Paolo Melchiorre after a short video session. (Photo courtesy of Paolo.)

I spent most of the day talking to attendees and, in spare moments, visiting other sponsor booths. There are financial firms, energy companies, developer tooling companies, aerospace companies, education companies, and much more. If you are at a conference, please do stop by the sponsor booths. They are happy to chat, and I promise they won’t hard-sell you on anything.

After a full day on my feet and talking with people, I had a quiet night and rested for the next day.

Saturday

More of the same: sponsor booth, recording interviews, and learning from attendees. My colleague, Galina, was demoing a new PyCharm AI feature in beta, which was very interesting to see how people reacted. The UI of AI models is still in its infancy, and PyCharm is one of many companies experimenting with how to make them easier and more powerful to use. I hope this new interface makes its way into a future PyCharm update.

Near the back of the booth, we had a sticker board asking visitors about the use of AI agents. As you can see, there is a lot of Claude Code, followed by Copilot, Gemini, Codex, and Junie. Cursor didn’t rate very high, and Cline was practically absent. Interesting anecdotal evidence for us to consider, as all of them are easily available within PyCharm and JetBrains IDEs.

In the evening was the annual PyLadies auction and dinner. It is quite the event. I attended with Jon Gould from Foxley Talent and my colleague, Mark Smith. Many items are auctioned off to raise funds for PyLadies, including a Django sweatshirt (Guido not included).

JetBrains donated several items as well: embroidery from my colleague Jodie, a gift bag with items from PyTV earlier in the year, and a custom skateboard to fit with the Southern California theme.

The event carries on late into the evening, though I retired after several hours to rest up for the next day and a 6am run with colleagues.

Sunday

If you head to the water, you can turn left and run along Alamitos Beach for a good five miles, or turn right and head up the Los Angeles River. With Mark and Galina, we decided to head right; after snaking our way around the fake lighthouse and other buildings, we landed on the bike path that goes quite a way along the river. For Mark and me, this was a 10k run; Galina continued on for at least double that, but she is a competitive ultra-runner, so in a whole other bracket of “runner.”

After a quick breakfast, it was time for coffee at Recreational Coffee—a place I managed to visit every day of my trip!

Then I raced over to catch the morning keynote from Amanda Casari, who works at Google Open Source. She gave a very inspiring and thoughtful talk about open source, AI, and how the two can meet. In particular, she highlighted the Google Summer of Code, which has long supported Django and directly led to many new features.

I attended talks all day, as well as an open space on the Python survey. Open spaces are where groups come together to discuss CPython internals, web frameworks, or even the PSF official survey.

The evening highlight was a big party thrown by RevSys, a Django and AI consultancy. There were a lot of people there and it was a ton of fun, marking the end of the talks portion of the conference.

Monday/Tuesday

Monday was the first of two sprint days, during which attendees self-organized into groups to work on projects. It’s an incredibly welcoming and exciting time. You’ll find the long-time maintainer of Flask at a table helping both first-time contributors and experienced members with tickets. There will be impromptu discussions around security, as happened between the Flask and Django teams. And the PSF Board of Directors even finds time to meet during all of this.

Here’s my colleague Cheuk, who was the Sprints chair, standing by the large board of topics available for sprints.

And it’s a chance for a slightly slower pace than the talks themselves. For example, I finally had a chance to chat briefly with Pamela Fox from Microsoft and Elaine Wong, who was the Chair of PyCon this year.

Wednesday

I headed to LAX for the flight home early Wednesday morning, accompanied in the cab by PyCharm’s Head of Python Ecosystem, Mark Smith. It was a good opportunity to recap the conference, share anecdotes, and plan for the next few months with PyCharm.

More than any prior PyCon I’ve attended, AI was the subtext of nearly every conversation — at the booth, in the hallways, in Amanda Casari’s keynote. The community is figuring out what it means, and there’s no better place to watch that happen in real time. Whereas last year there was palpable excitement about AI and uncertainty about how it would change programming, this year the vibes were closer to acceptance of it as a tool that’s not going anywhere, coupled with unease about both job cuts and the lack of knowledge amongst junior programmers. I expected more talk of agentic programming patterns, and while that happened, it was rarer than I anticipated. The bigger shift was people moving from “Is AI a thing?” to “How is AI going to change everything?”