Pycon.de: community building and task automation - Cosima Meyer¶

Tags: pycon, python

(One of my summaries of the 2025 pycon.de conference in Darmstadt, DE).

Full title: code & community: the synergy of community building and task automation

Cosima organizes PyLadies and R-Ladies events.

Visibility is important. You have to be visible to be noticed. Time is also important: you have to put in work to create good content. But you also want to have time for other things. So she thought about creating an “automated megaphone” to help her and other PyLadies members be more visible.

She created the pyladies bot on bluesky and mastodon. It regularly shares portraits of “amazing women in tech”. And it reposts messages when tagged or mentioned. It also monitors blogs and posts about them. See https://github.com/cosimameyer/awesome-pyladies-blogs

The bot runs as a github action “cron job”.

She started using google’s “gemini” LLM to create short summaries of the blog posts to make it more likely for people to click on it. She picked a cheap, small model as that was good enough. In addition she does an extra automated check on harassment, dangerous content, etc.

Lessons learned:

• You can use powerfull LLMs to enhance your applications.

• Integrating modern LLMs is straightforward and easy.

• No need to go all the way to the cloud, you can just use the models via an API.

• It is cost-effective for smasll projects and/or developers.

Photo explanation: random picture from Darmstadt (DE)