I remember myself hitting the submit button on the Call For Proposals form while thinking how proud I could be to even think that I had the right qualifications to give a talk at an event of this type. By that time, I had never attended a PyCon before, or even given a talk of this kind.

Call me crazy, but I love to challenge myself. Some time ago, I realized that I would soon be turning 30 and still being the same shy tiny person that no one take serious, so, for the sake of self-improvement I decided to accept the challenge to stand in front of God knows how many people and see if I could survive.

I spent several days thinking of what to talk about. I wanted to talk of something that I felt comfortable with and be interesting at the same time. I finally decided to talk about Flask, a web framework written in Python that I had used at my previous job for some time.

I structured the talk and finally submitted my proposal to PyConES. This was the first talk proposal that I’ve ever made, so I was not confident about it.

Around a couple of weeks before, I got the confirmation email: my talk proposal had been accepted! I couldn’t believe it, my first time going to a PyCon will be as a speaker!

I am assuming you are all familiarized with PyCon, but if not, every year annual conferences related to Python programming language take place in all over the world during the hole year. Those conferences are called PyCon, and they are organized by the python community in the country they take place.

Since the python community in Guatemala is very small, we haven’t had any PyCon before (something that I’m planning to change once I get back home). I also never went to Mexico or Colombia before, the closest nearby countries that organize PyCons, due to my limited budget.

I delivered the best I could 🙈

I flew to Málaga, Spain for the first time. It was a relief from the harsh cold weather that I was experimenting in my first two weeks in the UK. I won’t go into details, but I almost didn’t make it on time. Without Google maps, or internet, it was a real struggle to find the venue, but I made it.

My levels of anxiety were on top, but at least I managed to articulate words. I was afraid of being asked some complicated questions from the audience, but I answered all without too much hesitation. I am not happy with my delivery, but to be my first time, I think I didn’t do it that bad 🙂

I will leave the video of my talk below if anyone is interested in Flask. Although is in Spanish, you can turn on the subtitles on YouTube.

If you are keen on giving back to the python community, I encourage you to get close to your closest python group and even submit a speaker proposal for a PyCon. If I could do it, you will definitely do it better!