Specialist Tracks

In today’s cyber threat landscape, security cannot be an afterthought. Developers, operations, and management need to address cybersecurity at every stage of the technology lifecycle. The Cybersecurity track will bring talks from the cutting edge of security, from understanding the current and emerging threats, to defensive engineering and incident response. We invite software developers and cybersecurity practitioners of all kinds to share your in-depth knowledge, practical skills, and war stories with PyCon Australia’s diverse audience. Presentations do not need to have a specific Python angle.

This track would be great for: software developers, systems/infrastructure administrators, cybersecurity practitioners, and managers and CISO types who want to keep their finger on the pulse of cybersecurity.

This track would love talks from: Red teamers, blue teamers, GRC folks, software developers, vulnerability researchers

The Data & AI specialist track covers the full spectrum of how we use Python to work with data and build effective autonomous systems. This includes data analysis, visualisation, data engineering, machine learning, and the emerging discipline of AI engineering—designing safe, and reliable workflows with generative AI and large language models. We’re also keen to hear about the human side: ethics, evaluation, and the societal impacts of the systems we build.

Whether you’re wrangling datasets, training models, or integrating AI into production systems, this track is for you.

Speakers, tutors, and instructors unite: Expert and aspirational Developer Relations (DevRel) folk gather to share experiences and teachings! This track will be half formal sessions, half unconference, as folks from around the Developer Relations industry share their experience and insights. We invite those with DevRel titles to submit presentations, and participate in the unconference, helping share their insights with their peers, and those interested in the profession.
We plan to take part of our track into an “unconference” mode: we will run open spaces, with the content of these spaces decided on the day with the people who participate.

(i) The unconference will not be recorded.

This track would be great for: everyone currently in DevRel, or interested in DevRel.

This track would love talks from: Developer advocates, community managers, meetup organisers, hackathon coordinators (and more!)

Learn about learning, teach about teaching, and educate about education! Do you code with kids? Tinker on educational teachings? Has your Python programming in schools gone fabulously, or terribly? We’d love to hear about it!

Python programming is becoming more common in education settings, whether taught as part of the Digital Technologies classrooms, integrated across the curriculum, or embedded in coding clubs. We want to hear from teachers, education professionals, edutech enthusiasts and more about what’s worked, what hasn’t and everything in-between!

This track would be great for: anyone teaching Python - whether in primary, secondary, tertiary education or just for fun!

This track would love talks from: Python educators in any setting, formal or informal.

Do you find yourself empowering other engineers (or AI) in their development and getting their code to production quickly, cheaply, safely, and in an observed manner?

This is Platform Engineering, which is too often at an intersection with Python! Come and meet, learn, and share stories with others, and leave with insights to grow your platform!

This track would be great for: Any kind of engineer looking to be empowered, or engineers who empower others (Platform/Infra/DevOps/SRE/SysAdmin/DevX)

This track would love talks from: Any kind of engineer who has worked with systems or tooling to support others, or has war stories to share!

This track includes topics related to:

• the use of software engineering practices within Python and mixed-language code bases, especially code used for research or created by researchers
• the use of Python-based software tools (e.g. Spack) within the research software engineering (RSE) ecosystem.
• building bridges between the Python and RSE communities.

This track would be great for: Researchers, managers and software engineers thinking of using Python and software engineering practices to make software more robust and more usable for reproducible research.

This track would love talks from:

• People who manage research software engineers and have experience in assessing RSE contributions to the value of research programs, assessment of RSE skills and training of RSEs.
• People who have been involved in an interesting project where a significant research code base has been created, refactored or otherwise made more usable.
• People who have made a career change from researcher to research software engineer. Everyone with a story that shows why research software engineering is cool and valuable.