PyCon Africa 2024 was hosted in Accra, Ghana on 24 to 28 September 2024 at the Cedi Conference center. The conference is an in-person annual gathering of pan-African Python enthusiasts.
I attended my first PyCon in Ghana in 2019 which was also the first PyCon Africa. I wrote about that conference on the Real Python blog. I had such a good time there that I knew I would attend future PyCons. This year’s PyCon Africa was held in Accra for the last time before it moved to a different country.
The first two days of the conference were dedicated to tutorials, workshops and the Django Girls event. The next two days were the main conference days. Each conference day started with registration, welcome remarks and a Keynote speech in the main auditorium. The talks that came after the morning Keynote were held in parallel in two breakout rooms and then at the end of each day everyone came together in the main auditorium for the closing Keynote speech from a prominent speaker or community member.
A small detail that stood out to me was the strong security presence around the conference venue. I felt safe, though a bit intimidated by the police officers.
What I wanted to get out of the conference
I hoped to speak at this year’s conference but my proposal (on containerisation) was sadly not accepted but I didn’t let that stop me from attending. I looked forward to meeting old friends I had met at the last Pycon Africa and also making new acquaintances. Most of the talks at this year’s conference were centered on AI, and data science with a few talks on Python tools, language features and Ops. I wasn’t thrilled by this because the conference felt more like a data conference than a Python conference. It’s not lost on me that A.I is all everyone is talking about right now and how much of a game changer A.I tools and LLMs are in the world we live in but A.I doesn’t exist in a bubble. A.I runs on infrastructure, and it’s code and systems need to be built using the Python language and other tools, so I expected the conference to feature more talks on Python language features, web development, Python in robotics, documentation, testing, infrastructure and automation and community.
I’m not an expert in A.I so I felt out of my element in many of the talks but attending them gave me a good opportunity to learn about the problems A.I and data science engineers face, the tools they use and the infrastructure they build on. I’ll use the information I learned and do research on how to deploy, and manage A.I and data infrastructure.
Event Highlights
I enjoyed the talk on building Cloud and serverless applications using LocalStack by Harsh Mishra. LocalStack is a tool I’ve heard about but haven’t had the chance to play with. It is a drop in replacement for AWS in your local and dev environments. It exposes an AWS-like API that you can use to build and test cloud applications locally without having to create sandbox or test AWS accounts and services.
The second talk I enjoyed was a case study on how Fido scaled its backend infrastructure to serve more markets using Python’s Asyncio by Dor Hanegby. Google gave an interesting sponsored talk on a dataset they are developing to identify buildings in the Global South.
I enjoyed meeting and talking to people more than I did the actual talks themselves. I attended very few talks and instead spent my time in the hallways talking to conference delegates. I made many new connections that I hope will turn into friends.
In the evenings, I enjoyed going out for dinner with the conference delegates and touring Accra with them after the conference was over.
Conclusion
Overall, the conference was good, and I enjoyed meeting everyone there. I’m grateful to the conference organisers, sponsors and speakers for setting the conference up, making the event a success and ensuring that we all had a good time. The next PyCon Africa will be in South Africa in 2025.