February 2026: Discussion - TechFest, HTMX, FastAPI

This month we’ll have more of an open discussion with just a bit of presentation-ish content.

TechFest is coming this weekend! What can we do to lure the youth of this era (and their parents) into diving into the joys of? What successes have you had? What approaches have you seen, or would just like to try?

We’ve had (separate) meetings before on both HTMX and FastAPI.
This time we’ll go through using them together in an actual (though simple) project.

HTMX is a web technology that makes available an enhanced set of HTML5-like elements - call them “HTML5 plus plus”. You can use them to write webpages with a lot of the slick dynamic content that you would ordinarily use JavaScript for.

Any language can be used for the server side (backend) of an HTMX webpage. We’ll use FastAPI, one of those all the cool kids are using it web frameworks from the Python world. It leverages async programming and Pydantic schema specifications to their maximal extent (although that might not come through in the simple app we set up).

Location: Innovation Hub

We meet in the Innovation Hub, a gorgeous new facility that’s part of the renovated Dayton Arcade complex.
Enter through the doors that face the Wright Stop Plaza bus hub.

Street parking is free in the evening. I usually park on Ludlow Street.

or

if for any reason coming downtown doesn’t work for you (for instance, you’ve been exposed to COVID, or you’ve converted yourself to purely digital format and now exist as a set of cloud-hosted algorithms), we’ll be online as well!

Join us at 7 PM EDT on the PyFri Discord channel, discord.gg/9SgTh3T, and click on the General voice chat link. You may need to install the Discord desktop app rather than just using the web interface.