I've been an engineer for nearly twenty years. Over that time, I've worked with VB, ASP "Classic," ASP.NET, C#, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, and C++.

Notice anything missing?

For years, I eschewed Python because I didn't see the need to learn it. I scoffed at the idea of significant whitespace while basking in the supposed superiority of curly-braces and semicolons.

Undaunted by my criticism, Python and its community of millions of developers soldiered on. In the last decade, this 30 year-old language has become a de facto language for the web, cloud, DevOps, even microcontrollers.

In the last 5 years, I've learned to embrace this quirky, beautiful language and use it daily for desktop productivity, the web, and embedded development. In this session, I'll share reasons why I think Python matters, and ways you can start using the language in your own projects, today.