My experience at PyCon US 2026

I'm writing this post on the flight back from PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach, California. It was my second time attending PyCon, and it was a fantastic conference - a cornocopia of Python knowledge, but more importantly, a coming-together of developers across the Python ecosystem. I'll recap my PyCon US 2026 experience in this post, both what I contributed and what thousands of others contributed. First, a big old disclaimer: part of my job as a developer advocate at Microsoft is to attend conferences like PyCon, so I was able to expense my travel and spend my work days on my PyCon contributions. But that's also why I picked my job, as it gives me the excuse to do things that I'd want to do anyway, like attending the largest gathering of Python devs in the world. My tutorial Since I've been spending so much time on Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the past year, I submitted an idea to the PyCon CFP to run a tutorial walking developers through the process of building their first MCP…