Get to know the all-star lineup of PyCon US 2025 keynote speakers. They’ve graciously answered our questions, and shared some conference advice plus tidbits of their backstories–from rubber ducks to paper towel printing to Pac-Man. Read along and get excited to see them live as we count down to the event!
How did you get started in tech/Python? Did you have a friend or a mentor that helped you?
CORY DOCTOROW: My father was a computer scientist so we grew up with computers in the house. Our first "computer" was a Cardiac cardboard computer (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) that required a human to move little tokens around in slots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation
Then in the late seventies, when I was 6-7, we got a teletype terminal and an acoustic coupler that we could use to connect to a PDP-11 at the University of Toronto. However, my computing was limited by how much printer-paper we had for the teletype. Luckily, my mother was a kindergarten teacher and she was able to bring home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathrooms. I'd print up one side of them, then reverse the roll and print down the other side, and then, finally, I'd re-roll-up the paper so my mom could take the paper into school for the kids to dry their hands on.
LYNN ROOT: I started in 2011, learning how to code through an online intro to CS course. It was awful – who thinks C is a good first language? I failed both midterms (failed as in, "here's a D, be thankful for the grading curve"), but somehow finished the course with an A- because I learned Python for my final project. After that experience, I had to learn more, but didn't want to go through a "proper" degree program. It's actually how PyLadies SF got started: I wanted friends to learn to program with, so I figured – why not invite other like-minded people to join me!
I did (and still do) have a mentor – I definitely wouldn't be where I am today without the guidance and patience of Hynek Schlawack, who also happens to be my best friend ( hi bestiee ). He's been there since the very beginning, and I hope someday I can repay him. I do try to pay it forward with mentoring women who are early in their careers. Everyone deserves a Hynek!
TOM MEAGHER: As a journalist, I've had no formal training in programming. Most of what I have learned — including Python and pandas and Django and other tools for data analysis and investigative reporting — has come through my connection to the organization Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE is a wonderful community of really generous journalists from around the world who teach one another new techniques and support each other in our projects.
GEOFF HING: I studied computer science and engineering as an undergrad. Python was really emerging as a language at that point, but a few years later, it was fully the “get stuff done” language among a lot of people around me. I really benefited from people I worked with being generous with their time in explaining code bases I worked with.
DR. KARI L. JORDAN: I was introduced to tech/Python when I began working for Data Carpentry back in 2016. Before then, you didn't know what I was doing to analyze my data!
What do you think the most important work you’ve ever done is? Or if you think it might still be in the future, can you tell us something about your plans?
DR. KARI L. JORDAN: The most important work I've ever done is making it more accessible for people who look like me to get involved with coding.
TOM MEAGHER: I'm really lucky to work for a news organization where I feel everything we publish helps explain a criminal justice system that is shrouded in secrecy and often really inefficient. That makes me feel like we're contributing something useful to the national conversation. If I had to choose one recent project to highlight, I was particularly proud of our work exposing how prison guards in New York State regularly get away with abusing the people in their custody. These stories only became possible after New York reformed some of its police secrecy laws after the death of George Floyd and took a lot of time and work to get it right.
CORY DOCTOROW: I have no idea - I think this is something that can only be done in retrospect. For example, I worked on an obscure but very important fight over something called the "Broadcast Flag" that would have banned GNU Radio and all other free software defined radios outright, and would have required all PC hardware to be certified by an entertainment industry committee as "piracy proof." That may yet turn out to be very important, or it may be that the work I'm doing now on antitrust - which seems likely to result in the breakup of Google and Meta - will be more important.
LYNN ROOT: I think my most important work I've done revolves around PyLadies. Founding the San Francisco chapter and working to grow the global community has been incredibly rewarding. Seeing how PyLadies has evolved into an international network that empowers women to thrive in tech has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career.
I take great pride in the rise of women at PyCon: in 2012 (my first PyCon) less than 10% of speakers were women. Within five years, that number rose to one-third. Looking ahead, I'm excited to keep making an impact in the Python community. With the PyLadies Global Council, we're focusing on how to make the organization sustainable. It's a decentralized, grassroots group powered by volunteers – and we need to figure out how to keep the momentum going.
GEOFF HING: I think the most important work that I’ve done is just bringing some structure, open source approaches and practice to newsroom code where many people are self-taught, don’t have a lot of technical support and are working under tough resource and time constraints.
Years before I worked as a journalist, I provided some commits to a records management system for volunteer groups that send reading material to people in prisons and jails. The creators of that software are still maintaining it, and it’s still being used by prison book programs after more than a decade. I can’t take very much credit for this project, but its longevity speaks to the ways software developers doing regular-degular volunteer work can begin to understand systems in ways that eventually let them apply their specific technical skills. The longevity also speaks to the persistent problematic conditions across U.S. prisons and jails, as well as barriers to incarcerated people getting access to reading materials, which my
colleagues at The Marshall Project have reported on.
In the future, I’m interested in synthesizing some of the approaches from open data movements but working backwards from the information needs of people for whom access to information can really be a life and death issue, rather than just focusing on opening up data.
Have you been to PyCon US before? What are you looking forward to?
CORY DOCTOROW: I have not - I'm looking forward to talking with geeks about the deep policy implications of their work and the important contributions they can make to a new, good internet.
LYNN ROOT: PyCon US is like the family reunion that I actually look forward to. Python folks are my people – it's the community I feel most myself in. I love seeing old friends, catching up with my fellow PyLadies, and talking nerdy, and meeting new people.
DR. KARI L. JORDAN: This will be my first time attending PyCon US! I'm excited to learn about the ways the community is using Python for good. I'm also excited for people to find all of the rubber duckies I plan to hide around the convention center :) Bring them to The Carpentries booth and say hi!
GEOFF HING: I haven’t been to PyCon before. But, beyond the utility that Python offers for my journalism, I just like programming as a practice, and I’ve found Python to be a useful, accessible language to write programs, and I’m just excited to be around other people who are excited about that, and have put in a lot of the work to continue to make the language so broadly useful.
TOM MEAGHER: I attended PyCon US in Montreal in 2014. I was much newer to Python then, and I was impressed by the breadth of experiences of the attendees at the time. I'm really looking forward to learning about new libraries that might be helpful in my journalism and leveling up my programming knowledge.
Do you have any advice for first-time conference goers?
LYNN ROOT: Seek out the Pac-mans! If you see a group of people chatting that have an opening in the shape of a Pac-man, take that as an invitation to join in and introduce yourself. The best part of PyCon US is the most ephemeral: the "hallway" track where you meet new people, hear interesting conversations, and ask questions of your favorite speakers, maintainers, and core developers. All the talks are recorded – don't worry about missing one. But you can't create new connections once you're back home.
DR. KARI L. JORDAN: Pick two events per day that you MUST attend. You'll burn out quickly trying to do all the things, so don't try. Take breaks when you need to - in person meetings can be exhausting.
GEOFF HING: I can only speak from attending journalism conferences that have a lot of programming (and Python) content, like NICAR and SRCCON, but I think taking good notes, especially ones that highlight potential use cases in one’s own work for a particular approach, is really critical. Also, just trying to make time to try out a few things post-conference while it’s still fresh.
TOM MEAGHER: When I'm entering a conference for a new community, I try to meet as many people as I can and learn about how they do their jobs, the problems they try to solve and the tools they use. I find a lot of inspiration from other fields who wrestle with similar issues that I face as an investigative reporter but often have new and vastly different ways to deal with them.
CORY DOCTOROW: Not having attended this conference before, I'm unable to give PyCon-specific advice. However, I'd generally say that you should attend sessions that are outside your comfort zone, strike up conversations by asking about things learned at sessions rather than asking about someone's job, and try the workshops.
Can you tell us about an open source or open culture project that you think not enough people know about?
DR. KARI L. JORDAN: Surprisingly, I'd say The Carpentries, and I'm of course not at all biased. We are the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills, yet many have never heard of us. I encourage you to visit
www.carpentries.org to learn more.
LYNN ROOT: There are so many big, intense projects out there – and they have their place! But I like to show appreciation to the small and the cheeky. Especially those with a cute logo: check out
icecream, and never use `print()` to debug again!
TOM MEAGHER: The open source landscape in journalism has changed quite a bit over the last decade, as many of the most prominent open source projects were sunsetted. One library I've found helpful on recent projects is dedupe, which uses machine learning to help with fuzzy matching of records and weeding out duplicates, a very common problem I face when dealing with messy government data.
GEOFF HING: Frequently, at the start of my data reporting, I’ll look for prior art by just searching for agency names, or data release names, or even column names in some data set I get back from a records request, in GitHub. I don’t want to blow up the spot, but a Gist that I came across with some Python code for decoding the JSON format used by a certain type of widely-used dashboard, was really helpful to me. I imagine that every community has someone hacking around making it easier to work with data in a way that agencies should be producing it, but aren’t. I also really appreciate academics who have written freely-available documentation around confusing and ever-changing data sets, like Jacob Kaplan’s
Decoding FBI Crime Data, feels very much in the spirit of open source projects.
I feel like people already know about this project, but I recently used
MkDocs and it was so easy to use. I think documentation is really important, and having something that lets someone focus on writing and not on tooling is so great. Finally,
VisiData is my go-to tool for taking a first look at data. Quickly exploring data is so much of what I do, and it feels like a spreadsheet application that prioritizes that use. If reading data, rather than making some kind of report for an administrative process is how you mostly engage with spreadsheets, I guarantee you won’t miss Excel.
CORY DOCTOROW: There is a broad, urgent project to update services that use outdated CC licenses (e.g. Flickr) to the latest CC 4.0 licenses. The reason this is so important is that the older CC licenses have a bug in them that allow for "copyleft trolling," a multimillion-dollar, global extortion racket pursued by firms like Pixsy and grifters like Marco Verch.
Here's how that works: older CC licenses have a clause that says they "terminate immediately upon breach." That means that if you screw up the attribution string when you use a CC license (for example, if you forget to explicitly state which license version the work you're reproducing was released under), then you are in breach of the license and are no longer an authorized user.
In practice, *most* CC users make these minor errors. Copyleft trolls post photos and stock art using older licenses, wait for people to make small attribution errors, then threaten them with lawsuits and demand hundreds or even thousands of dollars for using CC-licensed works. They threaten their victims with $150,000 statutory damage penalties if they don't settle.
Some copyleft trolls even commission photo-illustrations based on the top news-site headlines of the day from Upwork or Fiverr, paying photographers a tiny sum to create bait in a trap for the unwary.
The CC 4.0 licenses were released 12 years ago, in 2013, and they fix this bug. They have a "cure provision" that gives people who screw up the attribution 30 days after being notified of the error to fix things before the license terminates.
Getting sites like Flickr - which hosts tens of millions of CC-licensed works and only allows licensing under the 2.0 licenses - to update to modern licenses, and to push existing account holders to upgrade the licenses on works already on the service, is of critical importance.
Flickr, unfortunately, is burdened by decades of tech debt, as a result of massive neglect by Yahoo and then Verizon, its previous owners. Its current owners, Smugmug, are working hard on this, but it's a big project.
Once it's done, all Wikimedia Commons images that have been ganked from Flickr should be regularly checked to see if the underlying Flickr image has had its license updated, and, if so, the license on WM:C should be updated, too.
Thank you to all of our keynote speakers for participating! We are more eager than ever to hear what you have to share with us on the main stage next week. If you haven't got your ticket yet, it's not too late--visit https://us.pycon.org/2025/attend/information/ to get registered today. See you soon!
Comments