PyConDe & PyData 2019
Ammar Najjar · Posted on January 1, 2019
Fresh back from PyConDe & PyData-2019, this post shares and documents the experience. Think of it as a diary more than a blog, covering:
- Arriving
- First Day
- Second Day
- Third Day
- Sprint Days
Arriving:
The drive took about five hours on the 8th of October 2019, a day before the event, aiming for a hotel near the event venue Kosmos Berlin. Staying close to the conference venue is always worth the extra cost, trust me on this one.
Arrival was in the evening: shower, schedule prep for the talks and tutorials, then bed, genuinely excited for the next day.
First Day
Doors were supposed to open at 9 am. A short walk to the venue (about 5 minutes) got me there just before opening. They opened on time, and people streamed in. Right after the main door, tables labeled with letters, pickup your entrance badge by first name. Nice and well organized. Thumbs up PyConDe!
After the main door, is a hall, with an open coffee bar in the center, and sponsers booth all around. Also +1 for the decoration.
Wifi was available for all, and there were a separate wifi for tutorials, where people could pip install stuff easily.
Talks attended:
- Keynote: Ethics with coding: Avery interesting talk about decision making systems, and highly recommended to watch for both technical and non-technical people.
- Developers vs Enterprise: Nice overview about what roles are really involved in big projects, how they affect the project goal. If you are already working in a big company/project, this talk would be old news, but if you are not, and want to change jobs to a big company, this is worth watching.
- Running an Open source project: Nice experience overview for a joung maintainer, who started a python library on github, and how she was managing/marketing/developing all at the same time. Recommended if you intend to start something similar. Actually I kinda did similar thigs, except I don’t have an idea for a general purpose library.. yet.
- Migrating CPython to github: very interesting to see the challenges of migrating the core development of CPython from whatever they are currently using to github. Never imagined a core python developer could be unfamiliar with working on github! Surprising.
Tutorials:
- Pandas: little nice intro to pandas, nothing that I don’t already know, but it was nice to work in a small group on the same task. Haven’t done that since college.
- Decorators: also the basics about writing decorators. It was well organized, and the tutor was open to all questions which were really varying from entry to advanced python experience levels. This gives a very nice example on how one should do a tutorial. Well done!
Second Day
Many cancelled talks this day, unfortunately. Too bad for people who applied and didn’t get accepted due to the volume of applications. Well they mentioned the reasons behind that the very next morning, and it was mainly due to last minute illness (flu) or hardware breakdown.
A very interesting talk with Łukasz Langa, the original author of Black, ended with him handing over some black stickers in person.
Also Hynek Schlawack was there, and got to give him my feedback related to attrs.
Second day talks:
- Keynote: Python 2020+: very interesting points on how the release manager of CPython 3.8 thinks the development direction should be.
- Docker 101: These were two docker introductory talks, If I knew what was in there, I would not have attended. They coverd the very basics of docker.
- Python panel: alwys very interesting to talk to the core developer, and see how things are seen from the other side of the beloved CPython interpreter development cycle. They encourage and inspire people to contribute to the project.
- Static Typing in Python: nothing really new here, but nice to encourage more people to use type hints.
- The GIL: every now and then the GIL limitation problem rises, and this talk was a very nice investication process by the speaker on how they inspected their multi-threded python code and found out the origin of the problem lying in the GIL.
Tutorials:
- Introduction to parallelism and concurrency: nice, but the tutor made it to the third slide only 15 min before the end of the session.
Third Day
Third day talks:
Talks:
- Keynote: Rethinking open source: very interesting, I might refer to it when arguing about beinging open source into the interprise someday.
- Pytest: a very basic introduction.
- Pytest: a very instructive talk to show how to try and mimic pytest itself, interesting talk!
- What’s new in Python 3.8: self explainatory.
- Your name is invalid: talks about the difficulties people face when interacting with forign systems when it comes to unicode, insightful.
- Python vs R: a nice basic comparision, actually I only attended it for the lack of an interesting talk at that time slot.
- Data visualization: nice intro to two visualization libraries in python.
Sprint Days
At the night before I checked some of the suggested sprint topics, such as scikit-learn and Bokeh, so I cloned the repos and looked at the open issues.
Sprints started at about 10:00.
First up was Stefan Behnel, the cython maintainer. After a short conversation, curiosity got the better of me about what goes on inside cython, then the famous saying came to mind: “We write C so you don’t have to”. Being no C fan, other topics seemed more appealing.
So I participated in the Bokeh sprint, and for two days, opened two issues, and submitted one PR which got merged fast. We started during the sprint with adding static-typing for the python part, but I didn’t make a real deal, so I didn’t submit a PR for that change, and just consider it as a training! I learned a lot talking to Mateusz Paprocki about Bokeh and its infrastructure.
That’s how Bokeh sticker made its way to the back of my laptop, in addition to Black!
