EuroPython Blog

Financial Assistance Programme

In the second round of the EuroPython Financial Assistance Programme we granted an additional sum of 3000 EUR for April which results in a total sum  of 8000 EUR so far. There will be a third last round in May. So if you are seeking for financial support for coming to the EuroPython 2014 in Berlin you can still apply for the last round. 

We also started the sale of Financial Assistance support tickets last month. You can buy one or more Financial Assistance support tickets for a value of 10, 20, 50 or 100 Euro. With the purchase of  Financial Assistance tickets you will support further Python enthusiasts to go to EuroPython 2014 in case they need financial support for a ticket or travel expenses. The EuroPython organization team granted already 5.000 Euro last month in the first of three  rounds. Please show your appreciation for the Python community and help us to bring more people to the conference which could not make it otherwise.

Partner programme

We are currently working on the details for a partner & family programme in case you want to bring your better half or your whole family to Berlin. Berlin offers a lot of options for spending the time outside the conference programme like visits to museums, boat trips or guided trips to the Berliner “Unterwelten” and many other places of interest. A survey will be announced and published shortly in order to involve you and your partner into the arrangement and selection of the partner programme.

Diversity at EuroPython

There has been a heated discussion over the last week about the representation of women as speakers at EuroPython 2014 and about diversity in general. You can find the official thread here and the official statement of the EuroPython organizers here. Starting point of the discussion was that PyCon 2014 in Montreal reached an outstanding attendance of about  30% women (both as speaker and attendees).

The EuroPython organizers are committed to diversity by gender, sexual orientation and location. Besides the existing Code of Conduct we are working on an explicit Diversity Statement in order to make the EuroPython 2014 enjoyable for everyone. Making EuroPython more diverse is a long-time process that involves the EuroPython Society, the local organizers and the European Python community as a whole. Diversity and outreach can not be dictated but must be lived in reality on all levels.

Schedule

Therehas been some confusion related to the published preliminary schedule (also under the aspects of diversity). The complete schedule will be announced shortly with roughly additional 50 talks and all trainings. The programme team is currently heavily working on the final version that will also take more diversity aspects into account for choosing the talks. We apologize for the confusion - specially to all persons that submitted a proposal keeping them in an uninformed state. The problem was caused by some internal miscommunication but also by the desire to publish a resilient schedule as early as possible in order to let the speakers make their travel arrangements in time.

Some good reasons for coming to Berlin for EuroPython 2014:

• great keynote speakers (preliminary)
• lots of interesting talks and trainings (preliminary)
• the bcc Berlin Congress Center is the perfect venue location
• Berlin is a great place to stay and for having a good time

Last but not least: mean, speak and discuss with hundreds of other Python enthusiats. Share your knowledge, ask questions, make connections, extend your network or just enjoy some days with other Pythonistas.

Get your ticket now!

We are pleased to announce Emily Bache as another EuroPython 2014 keynote speaker. Emily will talk about  ”Will I still be able to get a job in 2024 if I don’t do TDD?”

Geoffrey Moores’s book “Crossing the chasm” outlines the difficulties faced by a new, disruptive technology, when adoption moves from innovators and visionaries into the mainstream. Test Driven Development is clearly a disruptive technology, that changes the way you approach software design and testing. It hasn’t yet been embraced by everyone, but is it just a matter of time? Ten years from now, will a non-TDD practicing developer experience the horror of being labelled a technology adoption ‘laggard’, and be left working exclusively on dreadfully boring legacy systems?

It could be a smart move to get down to your nearest Coding Dojo and practice TDD on some Code Katas. On the other hand, the thing with disruptive technologies is that even they can become disrupted when something better comes along. What about Property-Based Testing? Approval Testing? Outside-In Development?

In this talk, I’d like to look at the chasm-crossing potential of TDD and some related technologies. My aim is that both you and I will still be able to get a good job in 2024.

About Emily Bache

Emily Bache is a software developer and test automation specialist. Currently an employee of a Swedish company, Pagero, she works on their electronic invoicing product. Together with her team, she regularly delivers working software. Emily has previously worked as a developer in organizations as diverse as small startup and large corporation, using
Python as well as other languages such as Java, Scala and Ruby. For several years she worked as an independent consultant, facilitating many Coding Dojos and developer training events. Emily is a well-known conference speaker, and author of “The Coding Dojo Handbook”. She is originally from the U.K. but now lives in Göteborg, Sweden. 

EuroPython 2014 is a community conference intended for networking and collaboration in the developer community.

We value the participation of each member of the Python community and want all attendees to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Accordingly, all attendees are expected to show respect and courtesy to other attendees throughout the conference and at all conference events, whether officially sponsored by EuroPython 2014 or not.

To make clear what is expected, all delegates/attendees, speakers, exhibitors, organisers and volunteers at any EuroPython 2014 event are required to conform to the following Code of Conduct. organisers will enforce this code throughout the event.

The Short Version

EuroPython 2014 is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form.

All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for EuroPython 2014.

Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference without a refund at the sole discretion of the conference organisers.

Thank you for helping make this a welcoming, friendly event for all.

The Long Version

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Exhibitors in the expo hall, sponsor or vendor booths, or similar activities are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, exhibitors should not use sexualized images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.

Be careful in the words that you choose. Remember that sexist, racist, and other exclusionary jokes can be offensive to those around you. Excessive swearing and offensive jokes are not appropriate for EuroPython 2014.

If a participant engages in behavior that violates this code of conduct, the conference organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund.

The full Code of Conduct text including contact information can be found here.

This text is based on the Code Of Conduct text by PyCon IE which is based on the original PSF Code of Conduct.

We are pleased to present a preliminary list of finally accepted talks. There are currently further talk proposals in the decision queue including trainings. We will announce a final list of talks and trainings shortly. Thank you for your patience.

We extended the deadline for the poster session until 28/04/2014. If your talk has been rejected this will give you the opportunity to resubmit your talk proposal for the poster session. The review process has come to an end and we will publish a list of accepted talk with in the next days.

We are pleased to announce that you can now order a prepaid SIM card through the EuroPython 2014 website. For 15 Euro you can select between a data plan with 1GB traffic limit or a phone plan with 200 minutes, 200 SMS and 200 MB traffic inclusive. You can choose the plan online as soon as you hold the SIM card in your hand. For more details see the official offer. Unfortunately the company doesn’t offer an English translation, but Google Translate or something similar should work fine - both plans are special deals between blau.de and EuroPython.

We also started the sale of Financial Assistance support tickets. You can buy one or more Financial Assistance support tickets for a value of 10, 20, 50 or 100 Euro. With the purchase of  Financial Assistance tickets you will support further Python enthusiasts to go to EuroPython 2014 in case they need financial support for a ticket or travel expenses. The EuroPython organization team granted already 5.000 Euro last month in the first of three  rounds. Please show your appreciation for the Python community and help us to bring more people to the conference which could not make it otherwise.

You can buy the SIM card(s) and the Financial Assistance support tickets directly through the EuroPython website (“ticket sale” menu).

Last weekend the web team met in Berlin (and was supported by one member remotely) in the rooms of Veit Schiele Communications GmbH in order to bring the EuroPython 2014 website software forward. The team under the leadership of Markus Holtermann implemented the following new features: 

• A short while ago we made some heavy changes to the main menu. Unfortunately the user experience wasn’t the way we expected it to be. Thus we got some comments on the EuroPython mailing list [1]. It took us some time to decide how to change the way the menu should work. Eventually, a click on a main menu item only toggles the menu as of now (GitHub issue 103) [2]
• We want to generate the badges (and other stuff for the conference) directly from the user data you provide on the website. This presented us with some kind of challenge as you will see in the next bullet point, too. We decided that the singe point of truth for the user data is the user profile. We therefore added a field where you can enter your interests. (GitHub issue 105) [3]
• As said before, the single point of truth for the user data is and will be the user profile. Unfortunately, during the purchase process of a ticket, we only have information about the buyer, not any of the intended ticket users. Although we didn’t change this part in the update (and we won’t change it in the future), you are now able to assign a ticket to another user. This is incredible useful for those buyers ordering multiple tickets, eg. for their colleagues or friends. To assign the ticket to somebody else, ask him/her for the user name and assign the ticket to him/her from your purchase view [4]. If the intended user doesn’t have a account yet, ask him to create one. All tickets that are *not* assigned to somebody will use the first and last name given during purchase. (GitHub issue #101) [5]
• Since many attendees are not from Germany, we looked for a way to hand out SIM cards. Due to legal restrictions this is not *that* simple in Germany (you normally need to present a photo ID). Fortunately we found a reseller where we become some kind of reseller ourselves (it’s a bit more complicated than that ;) ). Hence we will offer SIM cards within the next days that you can buy beforehand and you can pick up during check-in (more details soon). (GitHub issue #100) [6]
• When you modify your profile and try to upload a new avatar, but there are errors in some other fields, the avatar gets lost. We solve this by adding front-end validation to this and many other forms. (GitHub issue #47) [7]
• If you are looking for a job (in your real live, not the one on the internet :D), or if you think about getting a new job for whatever reason, you can now opt-in (and later opt-out) of job offers by our sponsors. We will *NOT* hand over any of your data to the sponsors. The sponsors have to give us their offer and we will send it only to those users interested in job offers. (GitHub issue #78) [8]
• The list of your purchases now shows canceled purchases too. (GitHub issue #102) [9]

Apart from those changes interested for you as an attendee, loads of other changes made it into production. If you are interested, have a look at our repository on GitHub: https://github.com/EuroPython/djep

All new features went into production today with an update of the portal software.

Thanks a lot to the web team and all other sprinters for their dedicated work on the EuroPython 2014 web software.

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/europython/2014-February/008323.html
[2] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/103
[3] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/105
[4] https://ep2014.europython.eu/en/tickets/mine/
[5] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/101
[6] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/100
[7] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/47
[8] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/78
[9] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep/issues/102

We just completed the first round reviewing the financial assistance requests. The financial assistance programme offers grants for people in need of a financial aid to join EuroPython. In the first round we granted a total of 5.500 Euro to sixteen persons. 

The financial assistance program is still open for further grant requests. The next decisions will me made middle of April and May. So please make sure that your request arrives in time. The complete process and requirements is described here.

Financial Assistance Programme

We are pleased to announce two of our keynote speakers of EuroPython 2014.

Travis Oliphant will speak about “Python’s Role in Big Data Analytics: Past, Present, and Future” and Bob Ippolito  will talk about “What can Python learn from Haskell”.

For details check our keynote speakers page.