Python Unplugged on PyTV Recap
Last week marked the fruition of almost a year of hard work by the entire PyCharm team. On March 4th, 2026, we hosted Python Unplugged on PyTV, our first-ever community conference featuring a 90s music-inspired online conference for the Python community.
The PyCharm team is a fixture at Python conferences globally, such as PyCon US and EuroPython, but we recognize that while attending a conference can be life-changing, the costs involved put it out of reach for many Pythonistas.
We wanted to recreate the entire Python conference experience in a digital format, complete with live talks, hallway tracks, and Q&A sessions, so anyone, anywhere in the world, could join in and participate.
And we did it! Superstar speakers from across the Python community joined us in our studio in Amsterdam, Netherlands – the country where Python was born. Some of them traveled for over 10 hours, and one even joined with their newborn baby! Travis Oliphant, of Numpy and Scipy fame, was ultimately unable to join us in person, but he kindly pre-recorded a wonderful talk and participated in a live Q&A after it, despite it being very early morning in his time zone.
The PyCharm team is extremely grateful for the community’s support in making this happen.
The event
We livestreamed the entire event from 11am to 6:30pm CET/CEST, almost seven and a half hours of content, featuring 15 speakers, a PyLadies panel, and an ongoing quiz with prizes. Topics covered the future of Python, AI, data science, web development, and more.
Here is the complete list of speakers and timestamped links to their talks:
- Carol Willing – JupyterLab Core Developer
- Deb Nicholson – Executive Director, Python Software Foundation
- Ritchie Vink – Creator of Polars
- Travis Oliphant – Creator of NumPy
- Sarah Boyce – Django Fellow
- Sheena O’Connell – Python Software Foundation Board Member
- Marlene Mhangami – Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft
- Carlton Gibson – Creator of multiple open-source projects in the Django ecosystem
- Tuana Çelik – Developer Relations Engineer at LlamaIndex
- Merve Noyan – Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face
- Paul Everitt – Developer Advocate at JetBrains
- Mark Smith – Head of Python Ecosystem at JetBrains
- Georgi Ker – Director and Fellow of the Python Software Foundation
- Una Galyeva – Head of AI at Geobear Global and PyLadies Amsterdam organizer
- Jessica Greene – Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Ecosia
We spent the afternoon doing final checks and a run-through with the studio team at Vixy Live. They were very professional and patient with us as we were working in a studio for the first time. With their help, we were confident that the event the next day would go smoothly.
Livestream day
On the day of the livestream, we arrived early to get our makeup done. The makeup artists were absolute pros, and we all looked great on camera. One of our speakers, Carol, jokingly said that she is now 20 years younger! The hosts, Jodie, Will, and Cheuk, were totally covered in ‘90s fashion and vibes.
We also had swag designed by our incredible marketing team, including t-shirts, stickers, posters, and tote bags.
Python content for everyone
After a brief opening introducing the conference and the event Discord, we began with a series of talks focused on the community, learning Python, and other hot Python topics. We also had two panels, both absolutely inspiring: one on the role of AI in open source and another featuring prominent members of PyLadies.
Following our first block of speakers, we moved on to web development-focused talks from key people involved with the Django framework. We then had a series of talks from experts across the data science and AI world, including speakers from Microsoft, Hugging Face, and LlamaIndex, who gave us up-to-date insights into open-source AI and agent-based approaches. We ended with a talk by Carol Willing, one of the most respected figures in the Python community.
Throughout the day, we ran a quiz for the audience to test their knowledge about Python and the community. Since we had many audience members learning Python, we hope they learned some fun facts about Python through the quiz.
Next year?
Looking at the numbers, we had more than 5,500 people join us during the live stream, with most of them watching at least one talk. We’ve since had another 8,000 people as of this writing watch the event recording.
We’d love to do this event again next year. If you have suggestions for speakers, topics, swag, or anything else please leave it in the comments!
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