PyCamp 2026, it’s a wrap

Here’s why you should consider attending this great community event too

NoteSummary

PyCamp is the kind of community event that recharges your batteries and restores your hope that another way of relating to one another, beyond stressful competition and selfish goals, is not only possible but very real and achievable if we create the proper environment. Here are a few concrete examples and takeaways from PyCamp 2026 that will hopefully inspire you to look for similar events and communities.

PyCamp 101

PyCamp is a community event primarily for Python developers, though not only Python developers; everybody is welcome. It is for people who enjoy learning with and from other humans and/or simply want to spend a few days in nature in a friendly environment.

Anything goes: you can code (or not) on self-proposed projects or someone else’s projects, play board or role-playing games, chill/read/draw lying on the grass, or simply stroll around and strike up spontaneous conversations with people - it’s up to you.

The event has a long history, but this time around I attended the PyCampES 2026 Edition in Seville, Spain.

Learning like a child

I find the intense, continuous, playful learning that we all experience during childhood rather difficult to replicate in our daily routine.
PyCamp is a great environment to foster and unleash that kind of “working mode” we all still carry inside. I think it is not only a lot of fun, but indeed a highly productive way of getting better at the craft (in this case) of dealing with computers and solving problems.

Ignorance is a blessing

I saw people (including myself) enjoying being ignorant.
Yes, you read that correctly. Ignorance, and being open about it, was the perfect opportunity to ask someone for help and trigger a human interaction. Often, the learning went beyond the initial question or problem and, most importantly, we felt thankful and happy about it.

Hands-on

The technical and non-technical topics and projects to work on during PyCamp are entirely up to the participants, who decide, plan, and organize their development.

There are talks, tutorials, debates, games, coding sessions, etc.
Just to give you a taste, these are some of the activities that kept me busy this time around:

• Micropython hands-on workshop (finally got my hands dirty with some hardware)
• Open debate about how the use of AI for coding affects our lives, jobs, skills, etc.
• Programming a Telegram bot to log workouts
• Chatting about the setup and security of self-hosted apps (like pypkg.guru)
• Learning about tools like syncthing, sli.dev, ttl.sh
• Of course, playing card games (truco!)

But that was not all. There were all sorts of other projects: TUI for MIDI consoles, Kubernetes workshop, NLP for medicine, robotic arms and RL, terminal games with bots, Kaggle competitions, htmx workshop, 8-bit computer emulators, etc.

My focus coding project

The project I spent most of my time working on was a Telegram bot we put together, and it was my first time building one. It’s a simple bot that lets you log and retrieve gym workouts remotely via voice messages, storing them in a database. Here’s a diagram of the architecture:

flowchart LR
    user([User])
    telegram(Telegram Bot)
    server([Server])
    extractor([Speech2Text])
    logger([Logger])
    db([Database])

    user -- voice --> telegram
    telegram -- webhook --> server
    server -- audio --> extractor
    extractor -- text --> server
    server -- text --> logger
    logger --entry--> db

In general, I enjoyed the API of the python-telegram-bot library, and now that I know how to do it, I already have a few more ideas for future bot projects.

Here’s the code, in case you’re curious. You can spin up your own logger bot from it in about five minutes. We even have a Dockerfile to get you up and runnning right away and we also support GPU for faster inference if you have one.

An upward spiral

I’m not going to dwell here on old debates about the efficiency of competition vs. cooperation. I just want to report my experience and close with a short reflection.

The spirit of collaboration at this event was beautiful, and I left with the impression that such interactions uplifted everybody involved. I experienced the emergence of a group dynamic that I’d describe as an upward spiral, a vortex of incremental and accelerating improvements in the level and quality of both technical and human interactions.

People were ambitious, but ambitious about sharing their knowledge, supporting others to strive and grow, helping out when they found someone stuck, preparing content in advance to get everybody on board. People were very ambitious – about being kind.

I don’t know about you, but to me that’s what humans at their best look like.

Join us next time!

/Fin

Any bugs, questions, comments, suggestions? Ping me on twitter or drop me an e-mail (fabridamicelli at gmail).
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