Brewing beer with Python: Speaking at EuroPython
Coworker and mood maker, señor developer Chesco Igual, submitted a talk proposal to the EuroPython 2016 organization which was selected in the community voting process. Last week, on Tuesday July 19th at 15:45 Chesco had his “maiden speech” in the fully-packed Barria 2 of the EuroPython conference venue, mentally supported by five of his Elements coworkers on first row seats who traveled with him to Bilbao and many more coworkers watching the talk live on the YouTube stream.
The topic of Chesco’s talk was the development of the Python back-end for the MiniBrew project he and his team have been working on. MiniBrew is a revolutionary “Internet of Things” home brewing machine that enables consumers to brew beer at home. Connected to the internet, the beer brewing device can be controlled using a state-of-the-art mobile app. Chesco’s talk zoomed in on the various component of the back-end architecture, the choices that were considered and the reasoning behind those choices.
The number one alcoholic drink in the world is undoubtedly beer. With the rise of craft beers, also home brewing has become very popular in recent years, although it is still a complex and expensive hobby. Dutch startup MiniBrew intends to change that with their revolutionary beer brewing machine, which is controlled by a mobile app and communicates with a Python API back-end.
In this talk Chesco will share his ideas and experiences in utilizing Python in the back-end architecture for the MiniBrew project he and his team are working on at MiniBrew’s development partner Elements Interactive.
— Introduction in the talk abstract
Chesco started by explaining what MiniBrew is and what is involvement is in the project. Interestingly, the red line in his talk was a list of technical project requirements: During his talk, Chesco was walking the audience through these requirements, discussing options and their considerations and kept on adding check marks to the list.
For example, for the “Real-time data” requirement, he showed a whole list of communication protocols such as HTTP, XMPP, AMQP and MQTT and explained they chose MQTT because it provides real-time and lightweight communication. Among all considered messaging brokers, they chose RabbitMQ because of its reliability, scalability, convertability, familiarity and the the fact is free to use. On one slide, Chesco hilariously showed the audience that Python can “chillax” when the mobile app client communicates directly with the MiniBrew, without the need of the back-end in-between the communication. Nice!
One by one all requirements were checked and at the end of his talk all requirements were marked green, visualizing that all project requirements were met.
A few questions from the audience in the QA section concluded the talk. Exactly within the assigned 30 minutes Chesco completed his talk and gave up the lectern to the next speaker.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on July 27, 2016.
