Our first meetup of the year is in the books, and what a way to start. We had a full house: RSVPs filled up, a waitlist formed, and 23 of you checked in on the night. Thank you, Vancouver. The room was warm, the questions were great, and the pizza disappeared at a very respectable pace.
A full house for our July meetup at Improving Vancouver.
The talks
We had two fantastic talks, and they worked well together.
Melanie Warrick (Temporal) tackled a problem every agent builder eventually hits: what happens when your Python agent has to wait for a human? Your agent reasons, calls tools, runs its steps, and then pauses for an approval that might take five minutes or five days, holding all its state in memory the whole time. Then it crashes. Melanie walked us through the agentic loop and showed how durable execution keeps that loop alive, complete with a live demo.
Melanie Warrick walking us through durable execution for Python agents.
Melanie Warrick is co-founding Fight Health Insurance, a production GenAI platform that helps people appeal insurance denials, and she is doing DevRel at Temporal with a focus on AI and durable execution. Melanie has been building in AI for over a decade, from neural networks built from scratch to fine-tuned domain-specific models to multi-agent orchestration in production. She prefers building, and hosts Vibe Check, a regular developer livestream on AI engineering patterns.
Daniel Chen (UBC Data Science) gave us a practical, hype-free introduction to generative AI and LLMs: how these models actually produce their responses, why the same prompt can give different answers, and what that means when you need reliability in real Python and data science work. If you have ever wanted someone to explain LLMs clearly, this was that talk.
Daniel Chen explaining how LLMs actually produce their responses.
Daniel Chen is a Data Science Lecturer in the Statistics Department at the University of British Columbia, and also teaches Data Science for the UBC Master of Data Science program. He was previously a Data Science Educator and Developer Advocate at Posit, PBC (formerly RStudio, PBC).
Thank you, Melanie and Daniel, for sharing your expertise with our community.
Our speakers and organizers after the talks.
We recorded both sessions! The recordings are not up just yet, but they are coming to our newly created YouTube channel. Subscribe so you do not miss them, and we will share the links on our other channels as soon as they are ready.
Thank you, Improving Vancouver
A huge thank you to Improving Vancouver for hosting us and for providing the pizza. Community spaces like theirs are what make free, welcoming meetups possible, and we are grateful for their support of the local Python community.
Sophia Chu from Improving Vancouver.
The Improving Vancouver space during Daniel’s talk.
Improving Vancouver is an IT consulting and software development firm specializing in application development, data engineering, and AI solutions. They hosted our July meetup and provided the pizza, and we are grateful for their support of the local Python community.
We raised $165 for our community
This was our first meetup since PyLadies Vancouver became able to accept donations, and our community showed up: together we raised $165 USD. Every dollar goes toward keeping our meetups free and welcoming, covering things like supplies, tools, and future community programs. Thank you to everyone who donated. We are proud of this community, and we want to keep showing off how much it supports its own.
We had some fun with it, too. Donors could pick up a PyLadies Vancouver tote bag, and as a special gift, the first two donors of the night could pick from autographed Python books generously donated by Naomi Ceder and Eric Matthes. Thank you, Naomi and Eric! Naomi’s book found its new home on the night. Eric’s book is still with us, which means a lucky donor at an upcoming meetup has an autographed copy waiting for them.
One small note for our donors: the donation receipts initially went out with an incorrect email address. This has since been resolved with the PSF, and we have contacted the affected donors. Thank you for your patience.
Tell us how it went
If you were there, we would love your feedback. It takes about two minutes and it directly shapes what we plan next: the topics, the speakers, the format, all of it. It is also where you can raise your hand to give a talk (first-timers very welcome, we will help you shape it) or let us know about a venue connection.
See you at the next one
Our first meetup of the year set the bar high, and we intend to keep it there. Follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Mastodon so you do not miss the next announcement, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for the talk recordings.
Thank you again to our speakers, our hosts at Improving Vancouver, our donors, and every single person who came out. See you soon!
PyLadies Vancouver
About the author
Keeps the meetups running, welcomes newcomers, and connects members with the wider Python community.