Year of the Snake Recap

Looking Back at the Year of the Snake

It’s already March 2026, you might think it’s too late for anybody to share a recap of the year 2025. Well, the good news is that we are still in the beginnings of Lunar New Year. So instead of recap of 2025, let’s review my Year of the Snake instead.

Last year was fun. I felt I was super busy with all the things, talks, conferences, but overall I felt good about it all. Even though I spent a lot of time with the Python community, I also made sure to spend quality time with my family and friends offline.

Year of the Snake in Numbers

 PUBLIC SPEAKING                        SERIAL EVENT ORGANIZING
 ┌─────────────────────────────┐        ┌─────────────────────────────┐
 │  1  Keynote (PyTexas)       │        │  5   Local Meetups          │
 │  6  Conference talks        │        │  1   PyLadiesCon            │
 │  4  Lightning talks         │        │  2   Summit & Hatchery      │
 │  8  Conferences attended    │        │  1   Sprint at PyCon US     │
 │  5  Cities visited          │        └─────────────────────────────┘
 │     for conferences         │                                               
 └─────────────────────────────┘          WRITING & MEDIA                                      
                                        ┌─────────────────────────────┐                                      
                                        │   3  Blog posts             │
 OPEN SOURCE                            │   2  Podcast episodes       │
 ┌─────────────────────────────┐        │   1  Documentary appearance │  
 │ 195  Pull requests created  │        │   2  April Fools' video     │
 │ 189  Pull requests merged   │        └─────────────────────────────┘
 │ 131  Issues filed           │         
 │  80+ PRs on PyLadiesCon     │         FUNDRAISING
 │      Portal alone           │        ┌─────────────────────────────┐
 │   5  Django library contribs│        │  58K  for PyLadiesCon       │
 │   1  Library release        │        │  14K  from School Hot Lunch │
 │      (gidgethub v5.4.0)     │        └─────────────────────────────┘
 └─────────────────────────────┘  
                                         PERSONAL & FAMILY     
                                        ┌─────────────────────────────┐                          
 ICE CREAM & TYPOS                      │   4  Countries visited      │
 ┌─────────────────────────────┐        │   7  Cities traveled        │
 │   2  Ice cream flash mobs   │        │   1  5K race completed      │
 │   5  Ice Cream Selfies      │        │      (42:16 chip time)      │
 │   40 Typo of the Days       │        │   1  Mukbang                │ 
 └─────────────────────────────┘        │   2  Aquariums              │    
                                        └─────────────────────────────┘

All the conferences and events

All the Talks

Podcasts

Other videos

Highlights and Reflections

As seen in the Python Documentary

Python Documentary was released on August 28, 2025. As of today, it has garnered more than 1 million views.

I was introduced to Ida Bechtle through Guido van Rossum. Guido mentioned that Ida is making a documentary about Python’s beginnings. She wanted to speak to as many people who were influential for Python’s history, and according to Guido, I was “certainly one of them”.

I responded to the email, had a short video call with Ida, and she said she would get in touch later on about filming.

In March 2025, my portion of the interview was filmed right here in my living room and basement office space. We also went out to Rocky Point Park to film some outdoor shots. I also invited Ida to join a PyLadies Vancouver meetup and she took some shots and videos from our meetup. During PyCon US 2025, Ida came to PyCon US to do more filming and interviews with other Pythonistas. On one of the days, and she followed me around for like an hour, and joined PyLadies Luncheon event and took some more footage during the session. Some of these you get to see from in the documentary.

I was interviewed about my journey into becoming a Python core developer, which started 10 years ago when I first attended PyCon US 2015. If you know me, you know the story already. If not, then please watch the documentary.

I really am honored to be considered part of the Python history and to be included in the documentary. I only appeared for a few short minutes, yet I received so many kind and supportive comments and private messages from people all over the world. I really didn’t expect these reactions at all. Thank you for watching and for taking the time to write and share your thoughts. I really appreciate it all.

PyLadiesCon 2025

Another big chunk of my time in 2025 was as a core organizer of PyLadiesCon. It was my 9th conference as a Serial Conference Organizer. The previous conferences I’ve organized were: PyCascades 2018, 2019, 2020, PyCon US 2022, 2023, 2024, PyLadiesCon 2023, and 2024. Heh, when you think about it, I happen to run my conferences in threes, like the Trinity.

This year was the most ambitious PyLadiesCon we’ve ever put together. The whole team worked hard throughout the year, starting almost after the conclusion of the 2024 event and all the way until the end of the year.

With the hard work of everyone involved, PyLadiesCon 2025 was a huge success raising more than 55,000 USD.

Not only that, in 2025, PyLadiesCon participated in more Open Source than ever before:

• We hosted a Sprint at PyCon US 2025
• We started developing our own conference management platform, an open source Python and Django project
• We open-sourced our documentation. These used to be in private Google Docs!
• We participated in Google Summer of Code 2025

Thank you to the core organizer team for their hard work and dedication, as well as our numerous volunteers.

Open Source Contributions

Secret Codes

I made Secret Codes, which is meant to be a place where I would deploy my personal tools, automations, and anything else I would need. The name Secret Codes came from Darren Hayes’ album, Secret Codes and Battleships.

It is a Django web app which is currently hosted on Heroku, with Postgres Database, and I used Digital Ocean for static hosting.

Currently, my “secret” codes that I’ve shared on it are my own web-based QR code generator, and my own dynamic URL forwarding service. I presented it at DjangoCon US 2025. I was happy to hear that people got inspired by the talk and went on to build their own QR code generators and URL shorteners. You might want to also check the DjangoCon US 2025 attendee’s experience from Keanya Phelps where she shared what she learned from my talk.

PyLadiesCon Portal

As I mentioned earlier, PyLadiesCon now has our own web portal, which is a Django web application that we started in March 2025 to replace spreadsheet-based conference management we’ve been doing.

This was my largest open source project of the year, with 80+ pull requests merged and 60+ issues filed as I built it from scratch. Features include volunteer management, sponsorship tracking, attendee stats dashboards, email notifications, and Pretix webhook integration for donations. At the PyCon US sprints we received 16 pull requests (8 merged), including Brazilian Portuguese translations. The project also participated in Google Summer of Code 2025, where I mentored a contributor.

Python Editorial Board

I continued serving on the Python Editorial Board. I’ve been maintaining the meeting notes which are public and open source on GitHub, and I also presented updates about the board to the wider Python community during the Python Language Summit at PyCon US 2025.

Django Ecosystem Contributions

I also contributed to the Django Ecosystem, although most of them were in the form of typo fixes. That’s ok. You know I embrace typos. Fixing typos was also I got started contributing to Python open source projects.

• django-pghistory: Fixed a bug where extra context was being overridden in the admin template
• django-import-export: Fix typo in contributing guide
• django-registration: Fix markup in ResendActivationView docs
• django-import-export-extensions: Fix markup in Storages docs
• django-plotly-dash: Fix typo in extended callbacks docs

Doing more contributions to the Django ecosystem was one of my long-term goals. I actually still don’t think I’m involved enough yet, but I’m glad knowing that I have made some small contributions. Hopefully, I could do more in the future.

Python Community Infrastructure

I continue helping to maintain the Python conferences listing, adding various Python-related events to the list.

I also contributed to the private python/voters repo, improving the script to include PR co-authors as active contributors for voter eligibility.

Writing & Content

I wrote three blog posts in 2025:

1. Core Dev Story: In case it wasn’t obvious, this was an April Fools post. A parody post about a Kairosoft-style video game that lets you play as a CPython core developer. You recruit core devs, develop features, fix bugs, and try to gain fame.

2. Don’t Use Forms for Event RSVPs: An opinionated guide on why community organizers should stop using spreadsheets and forms for event management, and a deep dive into Luma as a better alternative. In early 2025 when I asked people if they have used Luma, most of them said they have never heard of this platform. However, towards the end of 2025 and early 2026, I’m seeing more and more events using Luma as opposed to other platforms. Do you think my post helped at all?

3. Disabling Signup in Django allauth: A quick tutorial on how to disable user registration in Django allauth, which I learned the hard way after people signed up on my Secret Codes app following my DjangoCon US talk. I actually received many comments privately from people who also needed to do the same thing, and somehow landed on my blog for the solution. So that was real cool.

I also guest-blogged about Django and DjangoCon US at Caktus Consulting Group’s Blog.

1. DjangoCon US 2025: A Celebration of Community, Code and 20 Years of Django: Caktus Group went to DjangoCon US in Chicago, and I got to meet them in person for the first time.

2. Tips for Tracking Django Model Changes with django-pghistory.

Ice Cream Selfies

New this year, we started doing Ice cream selfie Flashmobs! Should we do more of these?

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Notable Typo of the Day

See more at #TypoOfTheDay

Social Media Highlights

Family & Personal

The Kids

My youngest son participated in the local Chess Championship this year, and is now an officially rated chess player!

My oldest son kept busy with school marching band, theatre, musical, and the robotics club.

They also joined me at regional tech events like Polyglot Unconference in Vancouver and LFNW in Bellingham.

Run for Women 5K

In May, our whole family participated in the Run for Women 5K in Vancouver. Both of my sons finished in the top 100 out of 818 participants, my husband placed in the 200s, and I finished 323rd with a chip time of 42:16. Not bad for a family outing!

Travel

Our family did both a summer and winter vacation, visiting 4 different countries and 7 cities in total. During our travels, we did so many things as a family: escape rooms, cave-tubing, fishing, watching sunrise by the volcano, snorkeling, and trying local viral foods. We even flew on a Pokemon-themed plane!

Mukbang

We ate a giant bowl of ramen at Ramen Gojiro. It is a once-a-year experience, and this was our second year participating!

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Cooking and Baking

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Aquarium & Fishkeeping

I’ve had my aquarium for years, and I also suffer from MTS (Multiple Tank Syndrome).

A new thing I did with the aquarium experimenting with growing sweet potato in it. I thought it was just a fad. I saw a lot of posts and videos about it online, so I decided to try it out for myself.

They said that the sweet potato roots could absorb extra nitrates from the water column, keeping the water parameter healtier and more balanced for the fishes. Indeed, after letting the sweet potato grow in the aquarium, the nitrate level goes down and keeping the water parameters more balanced. Not only that, I was able to pull out the slips, plant them outside in our backyard, and eventually we harvested actual sweet potatoes. We made them into sweet potato tempura!

Year of the Horse, here we come!

Thanks for reading this far! I hope you enjoyed this recap of my year of the Snake. I’m looking forward to what the Year of the Horse will bring!