URL: https://na.pycon.org/ (archived)
Location: Windhoek, Namibia
Participants: @danieleprocida , @ngazetungue , myself
About the event
PyCon Namibia is one of the longest-running PyCon events in the African continent. Its first edition took place in 2015 in the context of the Phoenix Project, a collaboration between Cardiff University and the University of Namibia, and has been running ever since, only taking a break in 2022. As such, this was the eleventh edition of the event.
The event has been organised by @danieleprocida from the start, with the local community taking more and more responsibilities over the years. It’s traditionally been heavily supported by the Python Software Foundation, among many other companies, organisations, and individuals. Canonical was a top tier sponsor of the event for the first time this year.
As every PyCon, all the talks and workshops have some relationship with the Python programming language. The event has been steadily growing in scope over the years, and this time it featured a Django Day and two Education Days before the main conference. One of the distinctive features of PyCon Namibia is the large share of young learners in the audience, due to a number of local schools encouraging their students to attend the event. The rest of the audience is a mix of university students, IT professionals, and international speakers.
Expectations
This was the third time I attended the conference in person, after learning about it from a lightning talk by Daniele at EuroPython 2016 (if you squint, you can see me in Daniele’s report of the 2023 edition). One could say that this event was one of the main contributing factors for me to join Canonical in late 2025.
I was really looking forward to meeting again my Namibian friends, some of whom I only see once every 3 years… On top of that, after observing some difficulties with hands-on sessions in the past, I wanted to test some assumptions on how cloud development environments could be used on bad Wi-Fi and modest laptops.
Finally, I had noticed that the Ubuntu Namibia community was growing stronger after the Ubuntu 25.10 Summit Extended, and I was really curious to see how much the presence of Ubuntu had grown in the community.
I can safely say I was not disappointed!
Highlights
I sadly couldn’t attend the Django Day myself. Luckily @ngazetungue already shared some photos!
Education Days
The first day happened at the offices of Adaire, an outsourcing company working with local talent. Sheena O’Connell explained to educators how to teach the foundations of Python, and Daniele continued by giving a beginner-friendly introduction to the language itself. In the afternoon I moved to another room to walk attendees through the process of creating a GitHub account and creating their first repository.
The second day at Jacob Marengo Secondary School was simply fantastic. The school staff had prepared a computer lab for the students (with Ubuntu-powered laptops, of course!) and we kicked off the day with an amusing recreation of the “Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwich challenge” by Ben Himes to teach kids the importance of precision and language in computing. After that, Paul Mayero explained how to use the Turtle graphics module from the Python standard library to create simple geometric forms with a bit of code.
After these shorter talks, Daniele gave away several BBC micro:bit devices and led a long workshop on physical computing. Helping students uncover the mysteries of conditionals and loops with their chirpy boards was lots of fun, both for them and for us helpers. Some students started gaining confidence and created their own small games and prototypes.
Of course we didn’t miss the opportunity to get some tasty grilled meat at the local Katutura market… somebody even bought a kilogram of kapana spice to bring back home (okay, that somebody was myself).
Main conference
The main conference was filled with juicy presentations from local and international speakers. After Elise Kasai welcomed everybody to the conference, we had an insightful presentation from Sumaiya Nalukwago, from Python Uganda, about the importance of soft skills. And right after that Azor Hijarunguru, a young Namibian, told an inspiring tale on how he got into robotics and later data analytics which left a lasting impression on the attendees.
From that point onwards, most of the time there were talks and workshops happening in parallel. I attended an interesting workshop on how to build AI-powered WhatsApp bots, helped Aaron Muti with his Humble Data workshop, and of course attended the lightning talks at the end of the day. My first attempt at doing live coding with FoxDot wasn’t very successful but attendees were amused with my typing speed anyway, so it wasn’t too bad…!
The second day was busier for me, as I gave my workshop on how to use git, GitHub, and remote development environments. The room was packed, the audience was very engaged, the timing was almost perfect, and the environment I chose mostly worked. Success!
(I wasn’t very impressed when GitHub Codespaces started giving me timeout errors with unhelpful error messages, so I switched to Firebase Studio, which got sunset by Google mere weeks later… I guess we were lucky!)
During the coffee and lunch breaks I had the chance to talk to lots of motivated students and young professionals, which filled me with positive energy and renewed my love for the open source community. It was also great to see @ngazetungue give away stickers of Ubuntu and other Canonical products!
My second lightning talk on FoxDot was a success. Just needed to rewire some audio connections… PipeWire and Helvum to the rescue!
Beyond the conference
Can you believe I had barely left Windhoek in my previous two trips? “Third time’s victorious”, as we say in Spanish. “But that is another story and shall be told another time”…
The future
I said at the beginning that the Python Software Foundation has traditionally been a strong supporter of the event, and their grants have made PyCon Namibia possible year after year. Unfortunately, despite Python being the backbone of the GenAI revolution and being one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, the PSF has been struggling financially for some years: PyCon US has been running at a loss, corporate investment has declined, and government funding has become unsuitable, all while costs continued to raise. As a result, they had to pause their Grants Program in mid-2025, and there’s no timeline for its comeback. I personally find it contradictory that, at a time when open source has demonstrated its incredible power to accelerate software creation, we are collectively failing to fund the shared infrastructure we need for it to continue to exist. I hope that the PSF can recover from this setback soon and sponsor PyCon Namibia as it once did.
I want to end this report with a high note though: I am optimistic about PyCon Namibia’s future, and the nascent local Ubuntu Circle is a big reason of that optimism. Local IT shops and non-software companies demand professionals who know other technologies, and I believe it’s time for the local community to expand the event to attract a more diverse range of professionals and companies, all while keeping its strong focus on open source. I am sure the Ubuntu Namibia community will have a decisive role in the future.
At the same time, it was encouraging to see that the local community is becoming bigger and stronger, and I hope they continue to improve the event over time. And who knows, maybe organize PyCon Africa one day…