My talk got into europython, that was pretty cool but little did I know something way cooler was coming my way. One fine evening we received a mail from the organisers calling out for help session chairing talk in the conference. I did not wanna help out, I had work stuff to do. I did not know anyone from europython and also I am a very lazy human being but then that night I was suddenly hit by a wave of thoughts and major FOMO, I was not able to sleep, My brain was basically telling me that I had to volunteer or it would not let me sleep. I had to wake up early the next day so to please the overlord I applied to volunteer and boy oh boy was the overlord spot on.
I did a couple of training sessions hosting speakers as a session chairs and cause of that got to know some of the amazing people who were volunteering too :)
This was the first fully online europython and what helped was that it was sorta the first time for everyone and not just for me so it was new to everyone.
The first day was scary, I was a session chair in a bunch of sessions. which basically means that I would introduce the speaker and moderate their Q&A. It was quite scary and weird for the first few times even though there were 100s of people listening, it did not really feel like it which also increases the scope for embarrassment. The most nerve-racking thing I had to do that day was to introduce the keynote speaker Jessica Mckellar, I was almost certain I would freeze and die but as you can see I didn’t die but the zoom call did freeze. It was fine tho in the end, I had fun.
I was speaking on the second day, so it was pretty exciting and also felt like I got the hang of hosting so I tried something. Since I was hosting myself I pretended to be two different people, not sure how it turned out but I managed to pick myself up and finished the talk. I was also the session chair for Marc-Andre Lemburg which was absoluting amazing. In the end I tried to be funny with a lightning talk on memes which was followed by Guido’s Q&A which was obviously awesome
Sprints began and things calmed down a lot, I got to explore quite a few projects and contributed a pull request to hypothesis and terminusdb
I had some amazing conversations, made a bunch of supa cool friends and had the time of my life.
Yay to the whole team https://ep2020.europython.eu/europython/team/
:wq