PyCon UK 2025 in review
27 Sep 2025It’s one week on from PyCon UK 2025, and we can’t thank everyone enough for joining us in Manchester and helping make our 4 days together such a memorable experience.
This was the first year that PyCon UK was held in Manchester, and the first time in many years that we’d moved away from Cardiff. Staging a conference in a new venue and new city adds extra anxieties, and more so since Cardiff City Hall has been a wonderful home for us for such a long time. However, in Contact Theatre we found a venue that shares our core values; and we could not have wished for a better place to share our goal of welcoming folks from all walks of life into our Python community.
The conference was fully sold out, with 350 Pythonistas attending 4 days of talks, workshops and sprints, from Friday 19th - Monday 22nd September. In addition to the main conference, we also hosted a Django Girls workshop, organised by Alice Wong and Providence Onyenekwe, where 20 beginners experienced their first steps into programming, helped by coaches who generously volunteered their time. Saturday also saw our Young Coders Day, run by Claire Wicher and assisted by young mentors from MadLab, and attended by 20 young people aged 8-16. One of the highlights of Saturday was the Young Coders’ demos, where our young coders told the full PyCon UK audience about what they had learned and enjoyed over the day. As one audience member commented, the future is bright!
From a show of hands in the opening session, we estimate that at least half of our attendees were first timers at PyCon UK, and it is wonderful to see that we are reaching new members of the community. Our attendees came from 12 different countries (approximately 80% from the UK). We had 65 sessions, from 59 speakers, selected from 230 proposals, plus a total of 28 lightning talks.
We are very grateful to our Gold sponsors, Bloomberg, Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, Flok Health and Snapshot AI, and our Silver sponsors, JetBrains and Internet Society Pulse, for their support for the UK Python community. We are pleased to be able to provide our sponsors with the opportunity to connect face to face with individuals from the python community, and to be able to interact with talented developers and decision makers. We particularly appreciated and enjoyed the willingness of this year’s sponsors to get involved with the spirit of the conference. Sponsorship is financial assistance that makes our conference possible, but it is more than that; it is a demonstration of an organisation’s desire to give back and contribute to the community that they are part of, and we are very glad to have you here.
We are also grateful to the generous grants awarded to us by the Python Software Foundation, the Europython Society and the Django Software Foundation. All of these organisations are doing amazing work to support the Python community and ecosystem around the world, of which PyCon UK is just a small part.
As part of our commitment to inclusivity, we had a free creche available to attendees, this time staffed by Hannasha and Iona from Sweetheart Nannies. This is something that we feel is a requirement for the conference, not just a “nice to have”; it really does make the difference for some attendees, who would find it impossible to attend otherwise. We also had our speech to text reporters, Julia Jacobie and Joanne Petre, who did a fantastic job of transcribing our main stage speakers in real time.
It was a pleasure to be able to invite community groups to join us this year, and we were very happy to welcome the University of Manchester, PyData Manchester and the Django Software Foundation. It was great to see their booths busy and we hope that attendees enjoyed finding out more about what they do.
A first for PyCon UK - we also featured a world premiere on Friday evening: Ada, a brand-new play inspired by Ada Lovelace, written by Emily Holyoake, and staged as a rehearsed reading by Nottingham-based theatre company Chronic Insanity. The performance was spell-binding and very well received; if you weren’t able to attend, we are very happy that Emily has given permission for the recording to be uploaded to our YouTube channel.
A final word from me (Becky, your conference director). I said the word “community” more times than I can count over the days of PyCon UK. Sometimes it feels like it’s becoming a bit of a cliche; but I truly believe that community is what we are. Community is what makes PyCon UK not just a python conference, but a place where we all feel welcome to come and make friends, build opportunities, learn, teach and just be ourselves - whoever we are.
Thank you to everyone who has been involved in PyCon UK, as organiser, sponsor, speaker, volunteer, attendee. Until next year!
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