Automating Event Scheduling with Python in Positron (Becky Hodge, ProCogia) | posit::conf(2025)
Automating Event Scheduling with Python in Positron Speaker(s): Becky Hodge Abstract: For years, scheduling for the Atlanta Writers Conference—where 200+ writers meet literary agents and editors—was a manual, time-consuming process using Excel and individual emails. For the May 2025 conference, we automated scheduling with Python in Positron, vastly reducing the amount of time spent preparing for this conference in such a way that these massive time-savings will carry forward to future conferences too. This talk will cover our transition, lessons learned, and how we’re planning to integrate MailerLite, Cvent, and TablesReady APIs next for the November 2025 conference to further streamline the process. Attendees will gain insights into using Python for event management automation and optimizing logistical workflows. posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: https://posit.co/about/subscription-management/
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi everyone, I'm Becky, and today I'm going to talk about automating event scheduling, specifically in the context of conferences. To give you some background about myself, I'm a bioinformatics consultant with ProCogia, and it's my day job, but outside of that, I also love to write. And thankfully, in Atlanta, there's a really awesome writing community here.
So I'm part of the Atlanta Writers Club, and it's the oldest, largest, and most active organization in the southeast for writers. And one of the ways in which they help writers is that twice a year, they host a writing conference. And sort of the goal of this conference is that, you know, writers come from all over the country to attend, because they get to meet with literary agents and editors who will hopefully help them get their books published. So the first time I attended was in 2019 as a participant, and then I started volunteering in 2022. And then this past May for the 2025 conference, I took over all the event scheduling.
And sort of before I dive into that, I do want to point out that, you know, there's kind of multiple kinds of conferences. And so, you know, Posit right now is more of a general conference. You know, we sign up for the entire conference, and then we can kind of roam freely between all the different events. Whereas the Atlanta Writers Conference, you're signing up per event, because the way it works is, you know, you're not really there for the workshops and the mini seminars. You're there to meet with the literary agents and editors for a query letter critique or a pitch or a manuscript critique.
So, you know, when you go to sign up for this conference, you sign up for the particular activity with the person you want to meet with, you know, because they're representing your genre. But note that we don't have you sign up for a time slot at all. And that's because, you know, we want you to be happy when you sign up and just be excited about everything and not be stressing about how to schedule everything. But that obviously means that us on the back end, we have to do all of that scheduling. So, you know, we have to make sure that everybody gets what they signed up and paid for with zero time conflicts and that they've got plenty of time to move between events without getting stressed out.
So, obviously, you know, when I heard this, I was like, that's a coding problem. And I especially thought that when I discovered that they were doing this manually in Excel. And there's like 300 plus people that come to this event and you can sign up for like 15 different events. So, that was a lot. So, yeah. So, I did this all in Python and Positron. The code is on GitHub if you want to check it out. But since we only got five minutes, I'm not really going to talk about that. I'm just going to talk about the impacts of that scheduling.
I was like, that's a coding problem. And I especially thought that when I discovered that they were doing this manually in Excel.
Impact of the automation
So, the first big thing was that basically none of the code changes. So, I set up the code so that the only thing you really change every six months is the inputs in the Excel file. So, you know, the different literary agents and editors that are coming and the different workshop talks and stuff like that. But otherwise, the code remains the same.
The second big thing is that they also used to send out individual emails with people's schedules attached. I fixed that as well. So, you know, now basically the code populates the custom fields that go into Miller Lite and we can with a few clicks send out a single bulk email with everybody's personalized schedules prior to the event. And then the other big thing that really helped was like on like at the time of the conference stuff was the code automatically outputs, you know, everybody's individual schedules, their name tags, you know, the conference rosters, all that sort of stuff. So, they can just print it out and we're sort of ready to go for the conference.
So, these three things really helped make the conference remain a really big success but with a lot less effort. So, that was really nice. And by far the biggest impact is that, you know, went from spending like 200 plus hours every six months on this to, you know, maybe spending like 20 hours. And that's awesome because the next one's in October and I will be doing that. And so, I'm very excited to only spend maybe like a weekend on this instead of an entire month.
And by far the biggest impact is that, you know, went from spending like 200 plus hours every six months on this to, you know, maybe spending like 20 hours.
