Posts Tagged ‘CareerChange’
[DevoxxFR2025] Side Roads: Info Prof – An Experience Report
After years navigating the corporate landscape, particularly within the often-demanding environment of SSII (Systèmes et Services d’Information et d’Ingénierie) or IT consulting companies, many professionals reach a point of questioning their career path. Seeking a different kind of fulfillment or a better alignment with personal values, some choose to take a “side road” – a deliberate shift in their professional journey. Jerome BATON shared his personal experience taking such a path: transitioning from the world of IT services to becoming an IT professor. His presentation offered a candid look at this career change, exploring the motivations behind it, the realities of teaching, and why the next generation of IT professionals needs the experience and passion of those who have worked in the field.
The Turning Point: Seeking a Different Path
Jerome began by describing the feeling of reaching a turning point in his career within the SSII environment. While such roles offer valuable experience and exposure to diverse projects, they can also involve long hours, constant pressure, and a focus on deliverables that sometimes overshadow personal growth or the opportunity to share knowledge more broadly. He articulated the motivations that led him to consider a change, such as a desire for a better work-life balance, a need for a stronger sense of purpose, or a calling to contribute to the development of future talent. The idea of taking a “side road” suggests a deviation from a conventional linear career progression, a conscious choice to explore an alternative path that aligns better with personal aspirations.
The Reality of Being an Info Prof
Becoming an IT professor involves a different set of challenges and rewards compared to working in the industry. Jerome shared his experience in this new role, discussing the realities of teaching computer science or related subjects. This included aspects like curriculum development, preparing and delivering lectures and practical sessions, evaluating student progress, and engaging with the academic environment. He touched upon the satisfaction of sharing his industry knowledge and experience with students, guiding their learning, and witnessing their growth. However, he might also have discussed the administrative aspects, the need to stay updated with rapidly evolving technologies to keep course content relevant, and the unique dynamics of working within an educational institution.
Why the Next Generation Needs Your Experience
A central message of Jerome’s presentation was the crucial role that experienced IT professionals can play in shaping the next generation. He argued that students benefit immensely from learning from individuals who have real-world experience, who understand the practical challenges of software development, and who can share insights beyond theoretical concepts. Industry professionals can provide valuable context, mentorship, and guidance, preparing students not just with technical skills but also with an understanding of industry best practices, teamwork, and problem-solving in real-world scenarios. Jerome’s own transition exemplified this, demonstrating how years of experience in IT services could be directly applied and leveraged in an educational setting to benefit aspiring developers. The talk served as a call to action, encouraging other experienced professionals to consider teaching or mentoring as a way to give back to the community and influence the future of the IT industry.
Links:
- Jerome BATON: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeromebaton/
- Devoxx France LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/devoxx-france/
- Devoxx France Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/devoxx.fr
- Devoxx France Website: https://www.devoxx.fr/
[PyConUS2025] Lightning Talks Saturday Morning: Career Pathways, Data Infrastructure, Creative Coding, and Maker Practice
Lecturer
This morning session continued the conference’s lightning-talk tradition under the guidance of the same community hosts. Speakers included Mario Munoz, advocating the Advanced Alchemy SQLAlchemy wrapper; Maya Kerostasia, recounting a transition from automotive technician to software developer; Joel Natividad, presenting high-performance metadata generation for data portals; Alex Ambrioso, generating musical permutations with LilyPond; Fay Shaw, analyzing pedestrian-safety data for a Massachusetts community; Anjali Datta, discussing Python’s role in magnetic-resonance imaging; Mylo Dove, extending legacy robotics with local language models; Eric Matthes, demonstrating automated Django deployment; Matt Leaverton, combining CircuitPython with laser-cut fabrication; Tristan Shippen, converting paint splatters into MIDI; and Wenqing Mao (presenting as a high-school researcher), reflecting on patience as a developmental practice. The diversity of backgrounds—from professional software engineering to recent career change and secondary-school research—embodied the inclusive range of the PyCon audience.
Abstract
The Saturday morning lightning talks explored practical database abstractions, non-linear career trajectories, automated data stewardship, algorithmic composition, civic data science, medical imaging pipelines, legacy-hardware revitalization, one-command deployment, physical making with lasers, multimodal creative coding, and the affective dimension of persistent technical work. The sequence illustrates how Python functions simultaneously as professional infrastructure, personal creative medium, and vehicle for civic and educational agency.
Database Abstractions and Career Transformation
Mario Munoz introduced Advanced Alchemy, a framework-agnostic enhancement layer over SQLAlchemy. While Django’s ORM supplies convenient audit columns, primary-key handling, and bulk operations out of the box, developers outside the Django ecosystem often re-implement similar utilities. Advanced Alchemy packages repositories that expose create, update, delete, list, and filtered query methods, together with an Alembic wrapper that reduces migration workflow to a handful of CLI commands. Munoz demonstrated a sports-league management CLI built atop SQLite, showing how the library allowed concentration on domain logic rather than boilerplate. An open-space invitation extended the conversation beyond the five-minute limit.
Maya Kerostasia narrated a trajectory from ASE-certified automotive technician to software developer. While working at a Toyota dealership and later a independent shop, she observed the labor of manually transcribing parts receipts into QuickBooks. Initial attempts to use the QuickBooks XML API proved intractable; instead she scraped O’Reilly Auto Parts pages with Beautiful Soup, stored results in a local database, and eventually exposed a web interface on recycled Linux machines scattered through the shop. The resulting system reduced invoice preparation from roughly thirty minutes to two. Although the interface violated numerous usability conventions and was never commercialized, the artifact served as a portfolio piece that secured first a desktop-support role and, three years later, a full developer position in Pittsburgh. The moral offered was persistence: continuous incremental improvement, even when immediate time savings are elusive, can open unanticipated professional doors.
Data Stewardship, Algorithmic Music, and Civic Sensing
Joel Natividad described a “data refinery” approach to the production of high-resolution metadata for open-data portals. Fifteen years of experience deploying CKAN instances revealed that data quality remains the principal obstacle to reuse. Rather than requiring exhaustive manual cataloging, the system ingests raw files—exemplified by a 520-megabyte, one-million-row 311 dataset—and, within a few seconds, computes dozens of statistical summaries and frequency tables via Polars and related tooling. Configurable Jinja2 expressions then populate CKAN metadata fields, rendering the dataset immediately findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The resulting high-quality metadata also supplies rich context for downstream AI applications. An open-space session was offered for deeper technical discussion.
Alex Ambrioso, a retired mathematics teacher turned piano instructor, demonstrated the generation of melodic permutations with LilyPond, an open-source music-engraving system that treats scores as text. A short Python script enumerates all permutations of a five-note set, emits corresponding LilyPond source, and produces a multi-staff PDF. The same pipeline can assemble more complex multi-part scores once individual voices are supplied. The talk invited musically inclined attendees to explore further combinatorial and generative applications of the text-based score format.
Fay Shaw presented MOSEY, an analysis of pedestrian-crash data for Malden, Massachusetts. Drawing on the Massachusetts Department of Transportation crash portal, Shaw examined temporal and spatial patterns, noting elevated risk for elderly pedestrians at night. The work, motivated by a fatal incident near her home, exemplified the conversion of public administrative data into locally actionable insight and the role of data scientists as civic participants.
Scientific Imaging, Robotics, and Deployment Automation
Anjali Datta addressed the rationale for employing Python in magnetic-resonance imaging pipelines. The talk situated Python’s numerical and visualization libraries within the complex reconstruction and analysis workflows required by modern MRI, underscoring the language’s growing presence in medical imaging research.
Mylo Dove demonstrated the revitalization of a Sony AIBO robotic dog through local large-language models and WebSocket communication. Speech input is processed by an on-device model, responses are generated, and the resulting audio and motion commands are returned to the legacy hardware. The project illustrated how contemporary open-source stacks can extend the useful life of discontinued consumer robotics while preserving privacy by avoiding cloud inference. An open-space invitation accompanied the demonstration.
Eric Matthes introduced django-simple-deploy, a plugin-based system that reduces initial deployment of a Django project to a single management command. After installation of the appropriate platform plugin (Heroku, Fly.io, Platform.sh, or a generic VPS), manage.py deploy --automate-all performs configuration, commits the changes, and pushes the application. A configuration-only mode allows review of generated files before any remote action. The tool thereby removes a perennial friction point for developers under time pressure and establishes a uniform deployment vocabulary across heterogeneous hosting providers. Documentation, an open space, and multi-day sprint participation were offered for further engagement.
Physical Making, Multimodal Creativity, and Affective Practice
Matt Leaverton, employed at Glowforge, combined CircuitPython on a Raspberry Pi Pico with the boxes.py parametric enclosure generator to produce a wearable “Pingu” voice box for his children’s Halloween costumes. Audio playback libraries handled the characteristic vocalizations; laser-cut vector paths produced a durable, child-friendly housing. The project celebrated the continuum from software abstraction to tangible artifact and invited conversation on electronics, fabrication, and playful making.
Tristan Shippen recounted the transformation of a paint-splatter photograph into MIDI. Image-processing steps isolated drips, fitted them to a grid, and mapped spatial coordinates onto pitch and duration. Jupyter notebooks with interactive sliders permitted rapid exploration of thresholds, rhythmic quantization, and scalar constraints. Although the sonic result was aesthetically challenging, the value resided in the construction of an open-ended instrument rather than in any particular output. The talk articulated a maker ethic in which the process of building flexible tools supersedes the consumption of finished products.
Wenqing Mao, a high-school student, closed the session with a meditation on patience. Beginning with an elementary-school infinite loop that temporarily disabled a parental laptop, continuing through reinforcement-learning experiments with AWS DeepRacer, quantum annealing of the traveling-salesman problem, and a year-long ankle-exoskeleton research project presented at the International Science and Engineering Fair, Mao framed repeated failure and incremental adjustment as the essential curriculum. Awards proved secondary to the cultivation of a durable working disposition. The talk offered a generational counterpoint to more senior narratives of career transition and technical mastery, reminding the audience that the same iterative patience underpins both early learning and mature engineering practice.
Across the Saturday morning program, Python appeared as database abstraction, career catalyst, metadata engine, compositional aid, civic sensor, medical tool, robotic interface, deployment automator, fabrication companion, creative medium, and moral practice. The lightning-talk format once again compressed an extraordinary range of human activity into a single hour, affirming the conference’s role as a crossroads of professional, recreational, and civic Python.