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.

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.

Last week, EuroPython 2016 finished, and it was an amazing conference I had the pleasure to attend. Here is my review of those days.

The conference

I arrived on Saturday noon at Bilbao, Spain, the day before the conference, so I had some time to know the city, see the venues, etc. The next day, on Sunday, was for two separate workshops: Django girls and Beginner's day. I attended the beginner's day as a coach, and helped a group of intermediate developers with several exercises aimed at explaining some Python concepts, such as: context managers, decorators, magic methods, generators, etc. It was really curious that some of these topics were those I was going to cover on my talk on Wednesday, so I felt really glad about that. I took an oath (very funny BTW) for becoming a beginner's mentor, and so I did (it was really good actually). I had a great time helping other developers, exchanging ideas and experiences during lunch, solving problems, and getting a first glimpse on what the conference was going to be like.