PyCon DE & PyData 2026 Thought the Eyes of a First Time Attendee

Published on April 21, 2026.

The 2026 edition of the German Python Conference, also known as PyCon DE & PyData 2026, took place in Darmstad near Frankfurt on 14-16 April 2026. This was my first time attending PyCon DE and I felt very welcome. In this post, I share a couple of highlights of my days at PyCon DE 2026.

1st Day

The conference started with a vibrant welcome by Alexander CS Hendorf. From the opening speech, I love the emphasis that Alexander gave to the spirit of community: “when things change fast, people who help each other have the advantage” and “we are a community that gets things done”.

Meeting Research Software Engineers in Germany

Published on April 20, 2026.

The 6th Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany (deRSE26) took place in Stuttgart between 3 and 5 March 2026. It is the largest RSE event in Germany and attracted around 250 attendees. Surprisingly, the majority of the programme was in English making it a friendly event for attendees like me that speaks very little German. In this blog post, I share a couple of highlights of the deRSE26.

Day 0

A satellite event (1st Stuttgart Research Software Day) to highlight the RSE activity at the host institution of deRSE26 took place the day before deRSE26 started. I didn’t participate in the satellite event but I think that similar initiatives are a great way to build momentum locally and catalyse the formation of a local chapter.

Migrating blog to Hugo

Published on February 15, 2026.

This week, I read the blog post “After 20 Years in Software, the Code Wasn’t the Hard Part” by Omer Arshad. In the blog post, Omer wrote

Eventually, though, it became obvious that the system didn’t reward effort; it absorbed it. If not me, it would simply find someone else willing to carry the weight.

So I stopped.

I decided I would do the job I was paid for, no more and no less. I would behave like everyone else around me: play the part, say the right things, attend the meetings, and go home.

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Migrating blog to Hugo

Published on January 4, 2026.

In 2013, I decided to start a blog. Static site generators was growing in popularity at that time and I wanted to use one that

• was implemented in Python
• use reStructuredText as the primary markup language
• maybe built on top of Sphinx

My options at that time were, in alphabetic order,

• Nikola
• Pelican
• Tinkerer

I decided to use Tinkerer and, soon, the first version of my blog was online.

In 2015, Software Carpentry decided to migrate from Pandoc to Jekyll and I end up using Jekyll more. After some time using Jekyll due my contribution to Software Carpentry, I migrated my blog to Jekyll in 2016 and adopted the Millennial theme by Paul Le.

Installing KOReader on my Kobo

Published on January 3, 2026.

In 2016, I brought a ereader Kobo Aura One when it was released because, for a long time, I wanted a reader with screen larger than 6-inch.

10 years later, I still own my Kobo Aura One. The hardware works as if it was new. Unfortunately, the device is officially discontinued by Rakuten. The latest supported firmware is 4.38.23555 from November 2025 (based on https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html).

The best thing about “old” hardware is that, probably, many people already managed to modify it. This is the case for the Kobo Aura One.