Another year, another FOSDEM edition. As always, since this conference grew so big (fact: if you tried to watch all videos in a row, it'll take you about 9 weeks!), chances are, every review you read from the conference will contain something different, and therefore, complementary.

This is what I was able to experience. Let's take a look.

A recurrent theme in FOSDEM seems to be the high concurrency. There were lots of people attending, which made it difficult to make it into some dev-rooms, as they were overcrowded. In addition, some very popular dev-rooms got regular-size rooms where not enough people could fit (for example the PostgreSQL one, as opposed to last year). Because of this, I missed quite a few opportunities.

FOSDEM19 it's just over, and here are my main highlights!

Saturday

After arriving to Brussels, and then to the venue, I wasn't on time for the first talk that interested me, and then I couldn't make it into the HTTP/3 talk because the room was full, so I decided to get an introduction to the conference by visiting the stands, and networking.

The first talk I attended was VNF development made easy with netmap, which was very good. Even though it's a topic different than what I usually work with, it was a really interesting talk with snippets of C code and low-level operations in the slides, deep technical insights into the details of networking, and quite enjoyable.

Last weekend an amazing edition of Python San Sebastián took place. Here are the main highlights of what the conference looked like to me.

Friday starting with a workshop on the morning that took place in the university of informatics of Basque Country. It was a workshop about machine learning, with Python.

The content was great, and enlightening. It's a very interesting topic, and presented with the main tools to work in Python: Jupyter, numpy, pandas, etc. Promising start.

These are some notes and takeaways on the recently celebrated Kafka Summit 2018 in London.

The conference was organized in three parallel tracks for sessions that were covering stream processing, pipelines, and internals. To get a good experience, I attended talks of the three types, but with a little preference towards internals and streams.

It was a two-day conference with lots of valuable technical content, awesome talks, speakers, and a lot more. Here are the highlights.

Summary of the last days of talks at EuroPython 2017, and the two days for sprints.

Thursday

The keynote for this day, titled The Different Roads We Take, made an interesting point by stating that the way we evaluate ourselves is non-linear, and coming from different backgrounds, gives everyone of us different a set of experiences and skills.

Afterwards, I moved to an advanced workshop called A Hands-on approach to tuning Python applications for performance, on which we covered several profiling tools for Python code, with pros and cons of each one (performance, overhead, simplicity of use), and some optimization techniques, running the profiling code after each improvement was made, in order to see the difference.

A summary of the first days (from day 0 --Sunday to day 3 --Wednesday), of EuroPython 2017.

Day 0: Beginners' day

Once again, like last year I volunteered for the beginners' day on Sunday, right at the dawn of the conference. It was another great opportunity to share knowledge and experience about Python.

In particular this time I was lucky enough to work with a group of mathematicians who used Python for data science, so I learnt about these concepts, and we worked a bit with Pandas for processing numbers.

The third day of the conference was hosted on a different venue, the Czech Technical University of Prague.

The workshops

I signed up for two workshops: search for fun (and profit), and Effectively running python applications in Kubernetes / OpenShift.

They were both great, and left me with lots of interesting topics for research and do further work.

The first one walked through the workings of elasticsearch-dsl-py, which was great not only because the explanations were superb, but also because there is probably no better way to review this than from the author himself. I was already experienced with the library, since I've used, Elasticsearch with Python, but even though, this workshop gave me a deeper understanding of the concepts behind it (there was a lot about the internals of Elasticsearch, how it works, its configuration, concepts of information retrieval, etc.), so I got new ideas. On the practical side, I'll check this project.

Summary of the second day of Pycon CZ 2017.

At 10:00 it was time for the first talk: a keynote titled What lies ahead? Python's future strengths and main challenges. It was a great talk, I really enjoyed the remarks of a Pythonista remembering thins from early Python conferences. The main conclusion that I took from the presentation was that, even in the early days there were some really tough challenges to overcome (for example the use of indentation, scripting, etc.), and Python surmounted it. These challenges were, perhaps even bigger than today's ones (debates about Python 2/3, etc.), which makes me think that current issues don't jeopardize the future of Python at all, so the community and the language will get through them. Really inspiring, and engaging.

The day started at 9.00, and at first it was time of check-in, etc. After that, I solved one riddle by kiwi.com, and earned a discount in flights, which was a nice way to start the conference.

Then after breakfast and some networking going through the booths of the sponsors, it was time for the first talk of the day: "When bugs bite - why neglecting edge cases can kill".

I had the great experience of presenting at EuroPython 2016. My talk entitled "Clean code in Python", was about good development practices, down to low-level design (with code examples), for Python. The idea of the talk, was to present the "pythonic" approach for writing code, and how do general concepts of clean code apply to Python.

These examples might be useful for beginners, developers experienced in other languages coming to Python, and people using Python for scientific applications. The examples could also be helpful for senior developers, because they remind real situations that might appear in pull requests, while doing a code review.