Dawn Wages
Dawn Gibson Wages is a software engineer, ethical open source advocate, and community leader. She is the former Chair of the Python Software Foundation Board (volunteer) and currently works as Director of Community and Developer Relations at Anaconda, the largest scientific Python distribution in the world. Her deep investment in the community is spent championing inclusive practices and sustainable growth in open source ecosystems. Dawn’s work bridges technical expertise with a commitment to equity, sovereignty, and collaboration in the developer community. When she's not working in the Python ecosystem, she is watching Star Trek in Philadelphia with her wife and two dogs.
Session
This talk is one part technology dance and one part walk through of Python environment best practices. In under 30 minutes, you'll see me load up some of the most gnarly environments and watch them fail. This isn't just another talk about dependency management. It's about the hidden cost of environment friction: the cognitive load, the lost spoons, the brilliant developers who almost quit tech because they felt "too stupid" to make pip work. It's about recognizing that setup barriers aren't just inconvenient—they're accessibility barriers that determine who gets to write Python.
In this talk we'll cover:
- Several environment failures (with dramatic audience participation): GPU-enabled errors, OS errors, mounted systems, CI/CD and virtual environments
- The human side of technical frustration: spoon theory, burnout
- Patterns about how environments break
- What the Python community is doing to lower these barriers.
Content note: This talk discusses mental health, burnout, and the emotional impact of technical barriers with care and intention.