Sheena O'Connell

Twitter Profile link: https://x.com/sheena_oconnell

Fediverse Profile link: https://fosstodon.org/@sheena

github profile: https://github.com/sheenarbw/

Sheena O’Connell has been programming since her early teens, and has worked on a wide array of projects and products, from embedded code and driver development for custom hardware, to microservice architecture, data pipelining and web development. She has taken active part in all phases of software development, from ideation to production; championed agile and devops practices and led dev teams to success.

Sheena is an incredibly passionate educator. She has given hundreds of people a start in coding and tech through her non-profit work, either through direct guidance, or through training trainers and education system design. She is passionate about codifying good teaching and learning practices in order to better support the world’s tech educators.

Accepted Talks:

Modern web frontend development with Python, HTMX and friends

Once upon a time, if you wanted to build a modern web experience using a Python based web framework, an obvious choice was to expose a bunch of APIs and build your frontend in something else entirely (eg React).

Times have changed.

Tools like HTMX and AlpineJS have made HTML great again.

These tools make full stack web dev fast and fun, they simplify development, shrink code bases, and give backend devs the ability to do modern frontend work. In my personal experience I've seen the adoption of these tools lead to massive productivity gains for junior and senior devs alike.

This workshop will walk you through the process of building and testing a CRUD application with a rich and modern frontend.

As we build this out, you will implement a few patterns for handling some of web development’s most common frontend requirements. For example, hydration.

We'll be making use of:

Django
HTMX
a sprinkle of AlpineJS
a touch of of Tailwindcss
Playwright for testing

Even though this is a Django-based tutorial, we wont be covering any super advanced Django functionality. Our focus will be on the frontend, and testing the frontend.

If you would like to see what these tools are about, here are a few talks:

This is a full day tutorial, and continues in the afternoon session

Power to the people who teach the people to code

Teaching people to code is...tricky.

Software development and teaching are two distinct skill sets, yet people with technical skills are often put into a position where they are meant to teach others, this might be through workplace mentorship, community involvement, or through being hired to teach (for example, in a bootcamp). They are often expected to succeed with very little or no teacher training at all. A lot of common practice is very ineffective.

Many think that when it comes to teaching, you either have it or you don't. I'm happy to inform you that those people are mistaken.

Teaching and learning is something that has been well studied. There are techniques, patterns, and anti-patterns. There are skills that can be learned and practiced.

I've been working in alternative education for a number of years, and the people who graduate from the courses I've put together tend to do really well for themselves.

In this talk, I'd like to share a few of the things I've learned over the years. We'll cover studies, mindsets, mechanisms, patterns, and anti-patterns. The Python community is full of people with teacher's hearts. My goal is to amplify their efforts.

Modern web frontend development with Python, HTMX and friends (part 2)

This is the afternoon session for the full day "Modern web frontend development with Python, HTMX and friends" tutorial.

See part 1 for the full desciption.