Silence is golden lightning talk

This is a lightning talk I did at PyCon US 2026: Silence is Golden. The overall message is to leave some quiet time so that reluctant speakers have a chance to participate. I start with a jokey disclaimer because I followed Simon Willison who gave an energetic, entertaining, and loud(!) speed-run through a year of progress in LLMs:I do these talks and blog posts about how to better interact with people, but I hope they don’t come off as too preachy. I have to remind myself to keep these ideas top of mind. I am one of those people who speak easily that I describe in the lightning talk. I have to remember to hold back, to leave time and space for other people.I had the idea for this lightning talk a few years ago at PyCon, while watching things going wrong. I was in a room with a few dozen people. The goal in the room was to hear from lots of people, but the leader of the discussion was a “speaks easily” kind of person, and I could see the dynamic of the room failing to make space for…

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