I had a fantastic time at PyCon Africa last week. Given how widely Python is used, it should come as no surprise that the conference delivered a great variety of eclectic talks. My highlight was to meet new and interesting people from all over the continent (and a few beyond).

In my talk about small machine translation models, I was asked about making my training code available. I've now cleaned it up enough for it to me somewhat publishable. See the Pocket Polyglot repo here. There is also a video of the talk, which starts at about 05:52:00 in this stream.

I was amazed by the amount of effort put in by the organisers to make this event a success. PyCon Africa and PyConZA are run entirely by volunteers, and what was achieved with so little is a bit mind-blowing. And that brings me to my one negative observation of the week - the lack of support from corporate South Africa, both in terms of sponsorship and representation. All the big banks, insurers, and consultancies use Python (and open-source software more generally) extensively, but were conspicuous by their absence. What makes this particularly grating is that these companies are often sponsors of big-money pay-to-play corporate conferences and events. To all the coders, data scientists and engineers in these companies - let's do our best to educate about the importance of not just using software because it's free, but to support the development of open-source software.