@mariatta, I think I would have enjoyed PyConUS. My attitude toward #python has been evolving rapidly. My first encounter was in the 90s looking at the mailman code, but never touched it or looked at it until a couple of years ago.
My reintroduction was via #SageMath. I liked using Python for teaching about other things, including #cryptography. I could write things that would be readable to many people and I didn’t have to use a bigint library. So I have largely shifted to #jupyter from #RMarkdown for my own notes on things and for exposition.
But (putting it mildly) I am not a fan of dynamic typing, and I was coding against the grain. But a very wise friend, @averagesecurityguy said, “Let Python be Python”.
The work of the Python typing community has helped me enormously. If I broaden my notion of “compile time” to include #mypy checks, then I have decent compile time type checking, while letting Python be Python.