Israel Fruchter: How much fun was EuroPython 2020

How much fun was EuroPython 2020

#pyconil got canceled

This year I’ve finally got enough courage and will, and I had 2 submissions for #pyconil. COVID-19 had other plans, and #pyconil was canceled

I’ve told @ultrabug about this (Numberly CTO, Alexys Jacob), after a few weeks he surprised me with telling me he’s gonna present scylla-driver in europython2020, the shard-aware driver we were working on in the last 6 months.

At the time it wasn’t yet ready nor publish. (Also found out that Numberly were sponsoring europython for years now) Took me a few seconds to figure that he just set me deadline without my consent…

Fast-forwarding a bit, and scylla-driver initial release came out: https://ift.tt/2P5275s

And my tickets for europython2020 were booked…

Discord is fun

Few days before the date, I’ve got an email with instruction to connect to the discord of europython2020, since it’s my first COVID-19 online conference, I’ve registered and login straight away.

It was really nice to be start to start talking with people and meet them a few days before

Each track got its own chat room, backed with zoom webinar and online youtube stream each talk got its own chat room, so people can promote their and answer question before and after the talks. Sponsors had rooms too, and all the sprints had rooms (we’ll get to that later on)

Talk about timing, day before europython2020, this press release came out https://ift.tt/2ZNsW4u

Talks — Day 1

The opening keynote was cancelled cause of technical difficulties, that lost touch with whom was supposed to talk. (it rescheduled to next day)

• Elias Mistler was talking about “How to write multi-paradigm code” show casing and coding live a sudoku solver, with functional and object originated approaches, and how to mix them both. The code is available as notebook

• Bojan Miletic was talking about “Django Testing on Steroid: pytest + Hypothesis” — shows the basic usage of hypothesis, I’m hear about hypothesis all over the place, maybe it will bring me one step close to use is in one of my projects

• Martin Christen gave a very cool demo of “pyRT - Computer Graphics in Jupyter Notebooks for Fun and Teaching” - I love Jupyter notebook visual trick, and I love 3d. So this one I enjoyed a lot, Martin was quite a performer and funny. I strongly recommend trying out the demo

• Bernat Gabor gave an excellent talk “Lessons from the Trenches: rewriting and re-releasing virtualenv” about a big refactoring virtualenv had, packaging is a subject close to my heart. This is an excellent lesson on how to approach major refactor and a reminder that it would always take more time than you’ll estimate it. I must say that this change, from a POV of a heavy user of virtualenv, wasn’t even noticed. When he was demoing a few things I’ve realized that I’ve seen it in logs, but didn’t know the big story happing behind the scenes.

• In the next one, Philip Jones was building a ASGI server from scratch, show the details of the ASGI protocol — “An ASGI Server from scratch”

• “A deep dive and comparison of Python drivers for Cassandra and Scylla” — Alexys great slides (which I had a peek at few days before)with lot of emojis, going down to the details of how cassandra/scylla hash ring works, and how scylla shard share nothing architecture is use by the scylla-driver fork we work on for the last few months. And he finished with data from Numberly production before/after moving to shard aware client, 2x-2.5x speed up in response time I was live tweeting the whole thing into our company slack…

• “Elegant Exception Handling”
• “Best practices for production-ready Docker packaging”
• “Pluggable Architecture”
• “Writing Zenlike Python”

Social — the missing e in my whisky

During the whole day I was playing cat and mouse with people, trying to bring them into the open track, to have a face to face meeting, only later after all the sessions end, some people came in, most of them were the part of the organizing team. Every one where show their beer or whisky that they were drinking. Keith Gaughan was laughing at the ice in my whisky, and also thought me a real whisky is spelled with whiskey with an e in it.

Marc-Andre Lemburg was talking about the challenges they have as organizers, one thing led to anther, and I ask how can I help. He said they need a hand with handling the tweeter account, and that he’ll hook me tomorrow with whom handle it.

After a few more rounds of whisky, I call it a day.

Talks — Day 2

TODO:

Sprints

• packaging -
• hypothesis -
• terminusdb-client -

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