PyCon Africa 2024

PyCon Africa 2024 was held in Accra, the capital of Ghana. I gave a workshop on building and testing Python serverless applications with LocalStack, and it drew over 80 attendees.

The session started from first principles: what cloud development actually looks like day to day, where the feedback loop breaks down, and why waiting on a real AWS environment to run tests is as slow as it sounds. From there I walked through LocalStack and what it does, then built a serverless image resizer live in front of the room. The idea was to show the full loop: write the Lambda function, test it locally with LocalStack, and only push to AWS once it works. That structure worked well. People were engaged throughout, asked good questions, and a fair number of them stayed back afterward to continue the conversation.

The response from attendees across Africa was good. A lot of the questions came from developers who were actively working on cloud projects and had run into exactly the problems we were talking about.

After the conference, the organizers put together a speaker tour of Accra. We visited Independence Square and the Black Star Gate, the arch built in 1961 to mark Ghana's independence from British rule in 1957.

The tour ended at Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, where the speakers gathered in front of the statue of Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah led Ghana to independence in 1957, becoming the country's first Prime Minister and later its first President. He is widely regarded as the founding father of Ghana and a central figure in pan-African politics.

Good conference, good city.