From Barcelona to Dublin: My First EuroPython
A few weeks ago, some colleagues from DEXMA and I attended the 21st edition of EuroPython, which happened in Dublin’s Convention Centre. For three days, there were 120 talk sessions compressed in different tracks, with topics ranging from diversity and culture values to music and game development. In this article, I want to highlight those that were most appealing and rewarding to me, as a software developer with two years of experience.
But before diving into that, I would like to dedicate a second to acknowledge the work of the EuroPython’s organisation team, entirely led by volunteers who not only excelled in the event’s organisation but also strived to making it a truly safe space for underrepresented communities, paying special attention to ensuring that it was a welcoming and inclusive event for queer communities.
The opening talk took place at the CCD’s impressive Auditorium on July 13th, a day after the release of James Webb’s photographs, and was led by Patrick Kavanagh, astrophysicist and software developer, expert in high-energy studies of supernova remnants, super-bubbles and the hot interstellar medium. The high expectations raised by the talk’s title, Python’s role in unlocking the secrets of the Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope, were completely exceeded. Kavanagh unfolded some of the key traits of a development where “90% or more of the analysis tools, data calibrators, the simulators […] were developed in Python” while he provided the audience with key knowledge on the core complexities of the telescope and the mission that enable us to be delighted by images like this one.
On the same day, Emma Saroyan’s talk on Property-based testing in Python took place at the CCD’s Liffey Hall, where Saroyan focused on Hypothesis, a testing library I had read about but never really had the opportunity to use, so this talk was a perfect excuse to learn its power. What ties Hypothesis to property-based testing is that it works by generating arbitrary data matching a given specification and testing it against your code, which makes corner cases easier and faster to detect while it also helps in designing cleaner and clever test suites.
At the closing of the second day, Jessica Temporal gave a very instructive and informative talk on Json Web Tokens, paying special attention to the RFC 7519, commonly known as the JWT specification. Right after diving into the core structure and purpose of JWT and illustrating it with straight-forward examples, Temporal gave a laid-back and precise explanation on types of JWT encryption algorithms and closed the talk with useful examples.
Finally, I was able to attend a talk presented by Marlene Mhangami, director and vice-chair for the Python Software Foundation and who is currently working as a Developer Advocate. The talk, named Elephants, ibises and a more Pythonic way to work with databases, focused, as its title points out, on Ibis, a Python package with the purpose of offering a more Pythonic solution in the field of analytical SQL. While giving details on some of the advantages of using Ibis, such as being very efficient when limiting, retrieving and operating data, as well as being compatible with SQLAlchemy — which can be used to compile Python expressions to SQL expressions — , Mhangami managed to beautifully illustrate it with images and facts about elephants. And just like a bird on top of an elephant, she made clear the idea behind Ibis: to have lightweight Python code telling the backend to do the heavy lifting.
Besides the talks described above, I also had the big pleasure to attend Ivett Ördög’s What transitioning from male to female taught me about leadership, Rogier van der Geer’s Protocols in Python and Sebastian Witowski’s Writing Faster Python 3, remarkable talks which helped me discover amazing tools — such as memory-profiler, py-spy or mypy — and also contributed in making from EuroPython a very positive and memorable experience; thus reasserting a well known Python motto: came for the code, stayed for the community.
