Data and Analytics Comedian Evan Wimpey is here to roast his own codebase! Enjoy the walk through of the worst Python habits.
This is meant to be comedy, but the best jokes always include a little bit of truth. Evan will share some hilarious stories of Python gone wrong, complete with code examples. That is, if the code even runs.
- Incomprehensible variable names
- final_final_2.ipynb files
- rerunning the same cell and hoping it works this time
- imports that are never used
- debugging with print
- ML models that are validated on training data
- code so poorly written that even ChatGPT can’t understand it
- and more!
Evan Wimpey is an analytics professional turned stand-up comedian, delivering smart, custom comedy. Whether you’re hosting a tech offsite, academic event, or a product team that just needs a laugh, Evan tailors content that resonates with your audience.
Outline
Speaker Evan Wimpey recounts his superior in the marines practice of recording examples of excellence in leadership, bravery and discipline. He says that whenever they met the officer would turn to the back of his notebook and write some notes. The back was used for negative examples.
This talk is inspired by that back of the notebook!
And a favourite reference is Ido Erev and Yoella Berby Meyer’s paper “On Learning To Become a Successful Loser: A Comparison of Alternative Abstractions of Learning Processes in the Loss Domain” which discusses we can learn more and much faster from failures than their successes.
Demo
Citation
@online{bochman2025,
author = {Bochman, Oren},
title = {Python {Worst} {Practices} - {Learn} from the {Expert}},
date = {2025-12-09},
url = {https://orenbochman.github.io/posts/2025/2025-12-09-pydata-python-worst-practices/},
langid = {en}
}