Alex Shershebnev is a seasoned Computer Vision and MLOps Engineer with over ten years of experience shaping the future of AI-driven software development. Currently, Alex leads the ML/DevOps team at Zencoder, where he leverages his extensive background in Software Engineering, ML and DevOps to deliver high-quality machine learning solutions. His work spans complex data pipelines, cloud infrastructure management (GCP, Kubernetes), and advanced ML/DevOps pipelines, ensuring scalability and efficiency.

Benno is widely known as someone with opinions and a (possibly over-)willingness to share them. He has been working with computers professionally for over 30 years (unprofessionally for longer) and takes particular joy in examining how computers, the Internet, and all that surrounds all of these intersects with the humanity that it is meant to help.

Applications Support Specialist at REANNZ
Open Source enthusiast.
Mechatronics Engineer

Charlotte is a User Experience (UX) Designer from Auckland. After completing her studies with Mission Ready in 2024, she continued refining her skills through online learning and hands-on projects, and is now working with SOFA Stats. She loves uncovering the hidden needs of users, sometimes the things they didn’t even realise they wanted, and transforming them into simple, intuitive designs that users can actually understand. Passionate about the power of UX to transform long-winded, confusing, (or plain ugly!) online systems, Charlotte is excited to create experiences that feel effortless and enjoyable for everyone.

Christopher Neugebauer is an Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organiser, who presently lives in the United States.

He serves as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, and is co-organiser of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in unusual venues — include an old vaudeville theatre, and more recently a barn on a farm — in Petaluma, California.

I am a freelance programmer, currently working primarily on CPython. Formerly a Principal Software Developer, working on proprietary mathematical modelling software. I have several decades of professional programming experience, in various languages and domains, but enjoy working on lower-level, performance-critical code the most.

I started attending PyCons in 2010 and have been using Python ever since, most recently in my role as Software Engineer at Crown Equipment (picking things up and putting them down). In my free time, I enjoy contributing to free and open source software, exploring Suckless programs, and writing my own technical blog at elliotsimpson.org when I find the time.

Dr Glenn Ramsey is an engineer and software developer with a background in C++ and Python, and a growing interest in using MicroPython in places it arguably doesn’t belong. He’s particularly interested in the intersection of code and hardware, from embedded systems to automotive experiments. He approaches projects as opportunities to learn by building (and occasionally^Hfrequently breaking) things, whether that's in the workshop or under a truck. His current focus is exploring how Python can be used in the creation of backyard solutions for things that would otherwise be cost prohibitive, while learning and having fun along the way.

Grant has been an enthusiastic user of Python for many years and has delivered numerous conference talks, meetup presentations, and training sessions on the language. Grant's open source statistics application, SOFA Statistics (over 300,000 downloads to date) is completely written in Python as is the forthcoming replacement SOFA Stats. More recently, Grant has collaborated with Ben Denham to launch the Lean Python (When Of Python) initiative aimed at ensuring Python lives up to its original promise of simplicity and elegance. Grant currently works in the Tech Insights team at 2degrees and was part of the Data Science Team at Qrious where he processed hundreds of billions of records using PySpark and Python.

Joelle is a network engineer for Netflix, where she uses Python to configure and monitor a network that spans the globe. She started programming on an Apple II when she was 5 and has worked in many different IT roles over her 30 year long career. She holds dual degrees, one in Computer Science and the other in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, which help fuel her vision of a world where everyone is included. Outside of work and her research interests (she is involved in research that benefits the neurodivergent and the rainbow communities), she loves to tinker with toy operating systems and old computing technology.

John is a sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and startup supporter who likes making things work, preferably from a terminal window. For him, the year of the Linux desktop was 1998, and once he’d set up his first web server, there was really no going back. After dabbling with bash, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, Forth, and other languages best left to history, he has now decided to dabble with Python.

Red Team @ GitLab. Loves finding intersections between interesting topics and sharing knowledge. Usually either making, growing or deconstructing something.

Previous talks include "My Kids Hack Me and It's Awesome", "Beyond 'Delete My Browser History': Infosec After Death", "An Approximate History of Accuracy", and an absolutely absurd maths lecture delivered on aerial silks called "Floating Points".

Computer enthusiast and student of computer science at Victoria University of Wellington

Richard is a well-travelled CTO, having presented to developers in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Richard has worked in companies in all shapes and sizes and at all levels, but above all just wants to help deliver great software quickly and learn a few things along the way. Richard likes good food, reading and trying to get AI to do more of his work for him.

Richard Littauer is a PhD student in Computer Science at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in Pōneke, Aotearoa New Zealand. His thesis is on building tools for using community science data to model bird populations and bird flu. His research interests beyond that involve open science, open source, community science platforms, and taxonomy.

He is on the board for PythonNZ. He is also an organizer for SustainOSS, and has recorded hundreds of podcasts on open source sustainability there, and he is one of the two organizers of CURIOSS, the community for university and research institution open source program offices. In his spare time, he is a professional conlanger, creating languages for TV studios and novelists, an avid reader and hiker, and interested in civic, local action towards a more sustainable future.

But really, he just likes birds. You can read more about his projects at his website and follow him online.

Professional software developer, Amateur content creator and rocket scientist. Loves Python, their cats, working on personal software and hardware projects, along with everything space, playing games and 3D printing things.

Shivay Lamba is a software developer specializing in DevOps, Machine Learning and Full Stack Development.

He is an Open Source Enthusiast and has been part of various programs like Google Code In and Google Summer of Code as a Mentor and has also been a MLH Fellow.
He is actively involved in community work as well. He is a TensorflowJS SIG member, Mentor in OpenMined and CNCF Service Mesh Community, SODA Foundation and has given talks at various conferences like Github Satellite, Voice Global, Fossasia Tech Summit, TensorflowJS Show & Tell.

Born Dutch, after a long stint as web developer, I went in to a new direction and started working with Python on Raspberry Pis, as well as integrating several APIs in to other applications.
Building new things, rebuilding old things, recreating things, anything IT related, I'll have a go at.
And if it's electronics and hardware related, I'll happily give it a try too!

Teijo Holzer has been working in the Visual Effects industry for WetaFX in Wellington, New Zealand for over 15 years on feature films like Avatar & The Hobbit. He has over 15 years of professional Python experience, and has been instrumental in discovering extremely difficult bugs in Python & associated libraries (e.g. PySide), providing reproducible test cases and suggestions for fixes.

In 2001 Tom handed in a programming assignment for a university class that came out to about two thousand lines of Java. His professor later shared their model answer to the problem, it was thirty lines of Python. Tom switched sides on the spot.

Tom is a senior software engineer for Kraken Technologies, and is the vice president of Python New Zealand, the charity promoting and supporting the Python language community in New Zealand.

Tristan Bunn began creating for the Web in the era of the PlayStation 1, grunge music, and dial-up modems. Over the years, he transitioned from designer to developer and now works as a Creative Technologies lecturer in Australia. His work sits at the intersection of creativity, code, and experimentation, exploring interactive technology across web, mobile, games, and immersive media. Bunn is the author of Learn Python Visually (No Starch Press).

Willem is a developer who's been happily using Python for 20 years. I love writing code in all types of languages but I just keep on coming back to Python for some reason.

Yash is a software engineer and researcher with a deep interest in distributed systems. His focus is on observability, an areas where he constantly seeks new insights. As an active advocate of OpenTelemetry, Yash contributes to both the project and the wider community. Outside of tech, he’s an explorer, whether in the kitchen experimenting with new recipes or traveling the world to taste diverse cuisines.