First event of 2023 - PyData Bristol

My first event speaking live in 2023 is at the PyData Bristol meetup, which is also my first PyData Bristol. I am so excited and here is what I see and do there.

Getting there

In the morning, I got notified that my train to Bristol has been cancelled. Recently we have train strikes in the UK so I am not surprised that something will go wrong with my train. Luckily it was not a last-minute thing. I decided to get on the train before it and arrive at Bristol a bit earlier than planned.

After boarding the train, I realised that the reason why the train was cancelled is that the region near Bristol was flooded so the trains are disrupted. Now I just hope that the train going home will be fine.

I ended up not arriving at Bristol much earlier than planned due to the train that I was on was also delayed. However, it didn’t matter as I was on time for the meetup.

PyData Bristol

When I arrived at the venue, the first person that I saw was my colleague Valerio. It is always good to see familiar faces in a new place. Then, another organiser of the meetup come and greet me, with their help, I tested the computer setup and we are good to go.

As my talk is in the second half after the pizza break I got a chance to chat with the organisers a bit before the meetup. I was also spotting who would I be interviewing during the break.

Then the meetup started, it is so exciting. The organisers made a very good introduction and I like the “ChatGPT nonsense of the month” session.

The first talk is quite interesting, we all learnt a bit about how computer chips are made with plasma and unsupervised learning from the talk by Greg.

Nest we have a lightning talk about federated learning, I am very impressed by the speaker Akiko, I think it would be great if she gives a full talk next time.

Then it is the pizza break. I also use this chance to set up my presentation, and record and interview some people I met at the conference.

Then I gave my talk. I was so excited to be giving a talk again. I think I am a bit addicted to it.

After my talk, it’s a lighting talk about NBFire, a cloud service to host your notebook on the cloud and run it on schedule. I think the idea is quite cool. I think our cloud notebook should have a run-on-schedule function as well.

And that is the end of the meetup. Some people will head to the pub for the after party, sadly I have to catch a train home. I would have spent the night in Bristol and joined the pub but I also miss my bed at home. It’s always a difficult choice for me as I enjoy chatting with the folks at PyData Bristol. I wish I can go to the meetup again soon.

You can also catch up on my talk online:



About Cheuk Ting Ho

After having a career as a Data Scientist and Developer Advocate, Cheuk dedicated her work to the open-source community. She has co-founded Humble Data, a beginner Python workshop that has been happening around the world. She has served the EuroPython Society board for two years and is now a fellow and director of the Python Software Foundation.

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