PyCon New Tracks

PyCon US 2026 will run from May 13-19, with the core talks taking place on May 15-17. This year's venue is Long Beach, California, marking PyCon US's return to the West Coast for the first time since Portland in 2017, and its first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013.

This year, alongside the regular program, a new AI track and Security track have been added. The AI track was organized by Silona Bonewald (CitableAI) and Zac Hatfield-Dodds (Anthropic), with Simon Willison serving as on-site host.

The AI track schedule includes the following sessions:

• 11:00: AI-Assisted Contributions and Maintainer Load - Paolo Melchiorre
• 11:45: AI-Powered Python Education : Towards Adaptive and Inclusive Learning - Sonny Mupfuni
• 12:30: Making African Languages Visible: A Python-Based Guide to Low-Resource Language ID - Gift Ojeabulu
• 2:00: Running Large Language Models on Laptops: Practical Quantization Techniques in Python - Aayush Kumar JVS
• 2:45: Distributing AI with Python in the Browser: Edge Inference and Flexibility Without Infrastructure - Fabio Pliger
• 3:30: Don't Block the Loop: Python Async Patterns for AI Agents - Aditya Mehra
• 4:30: What Python Developers Need to Know About Hardware: A Practical Guide to GPU Memory, Kernel Scheduling, and Execution Models - Santosh Appachu Devanira Poovaiah
• 5:15: How to Build Your First Real-Time Voice Agent in Python (Without Losing Your Mind) - Camila Hinojosa Añez, Elizabeth Fuentes

Simon Willison has attended PyCon for over 20 years, and emphasizes that even as the conference has grown larger, it still maintains a community-centered atmosphere. In particular, he cites lightning talks, the PyLadies auction, sprints, and open spaces that open up topic-based conversations as PyCon's core appeal, and revealed that this year he plans to participate in sessions related to Datasette and agentic engineering as well.

He also explained, as a Python Software Foundation (PSF) board member, that PyCon US is important both financially and for the mission, and asked attendees to use the official hotel block for the reasons outlined by the PSF.