Meet the August 19 lightning talks lineup

On Wednesday, August 19, PyLadies Vancouver and R-Ladies Vancouver are running a joint lightning talks night at VISST.

Come and watch: it’s free (donations optional). RSVP on Luma.

The lineup so far

1. Daria Linhart Grudzien, EuroPython Organizer and Former Site Reliability Engineer I Came for the Talks, I Stayed for the Volunteering

Organizing a meetup or a conference can look like pure giving. Daria makes the case that it gives back more than it takes, drawing on six years of organizing Python conferences in Europe.

2. Maksym Shalenyi, Python Developer Viy

Viy is process monitoring for Linux, built for Python. It captures CPU, memory, I/O, network, threads, and file descriptors together, with time series visualization and performance insights.

3. Sophia Chu, Software Developer, Improving Vancouver Agents as Sounding Boards: Psychology and AI

We may not trust agents with write access to our repos, but we hand them our doubts and our half-formed ideas. Sophia looks at the psychology behind that instinct and what it does to developers and teams.

4. Melissa Bather, R-Ladies Vancouver Co-Organiser Sasquatch Statistics: Spatial Point Process Modelling in R

Can spatial statistics explain why Bigfoot sightings cluster where they do? Melissa walks through a spatial point regression workflow in R, using methods that apply just as well to ecology, epidemiology, and criminology.

5. You?

6. You?

Submit your own lightning talk idea

We’re still accepting talk submissions for this event, so there is room for you.

Lightning talks exist because the format removes almost every reason to say no. Five to fifteen minutes. No need for a narrative arc, a live demo, or a conclusion that ties everything together. You explain one thing you know, and then you sit down.

Here is what we hear from people who almost submitted:

• “I am not an expert.” Neither are most speakers. A lightning talk is not a claim of authority, it is a report from where you happen to be standing. The thing you learned last month is interesting precisely because you remember what it felt like not to know it.
• “My topic is too small.” Small is the format. A function you did not know existed, a plotting default you always override, a package that saved you an afternoon. Five minutes is not enough room for a big topic anyway.
• “Someone already gave this talk.” Not to this room, and not in your words.
• “I already gave this talk somewhere else.” Good. Give it again. Reusing a talk is allowed and encouraged, and it is the least expensive way to get on a stage.
• “I do not know what to say yet.” Submit anyway and tell us that. We will work it out with you.

Python or R. Either community, either language, either room.

Not sure what the format looks like? Our Lightning Talks guide covers how to prepare, topic ideas, example talks to watch, and the questions we get asked most.

A joint event with R-Ladies

PyLadies Vancouver and R-Ladies Vancouver draw from overlapping communities and solve overlapping problems, usually in separate rooms. Data work does not respect the language boundary. Most people we know reach for both and are slightly apologetic about it.

A lightning talks night is the easiest possible way to put those rooms together. Short talks mean nobody has to sit through forty minutes of a stack they do not use, and the range of what counts as on topic gets much wider.

The details

• When: Wednesday, August 19, 2026, 6 to 8 PM, talks from 6:00 to 7:20
• Where: VISST, 1490 West Broadway, Suite 200, Vancouver
• Food: light snacks provided

The event is free, and tickets are on Luma. The suggested donation is CA$10, and it is entirely optional.

If you cannot donate, come anyway. That is what free is for.

If this is your first R-Ladies event, please take a moment to read the R-Ladies Global code of conduct. PyLadies events follow the PyLadies Code of Conduct.

Thank you to VISST for hosting us.