After the keynotes and talks on Thursday, July 11th, we’ve organized a social event at the workshop venue, the FHNW Muttenz. Starting at 19:00 CEST, you can join us for an evening party with finger food, drinks and music.
We are using a volunteer management app for the organization and a Telegram group for communication.
We have a few exciting tasks to offer such as helping out setting up and tearing down the conference space, giving out goodie bags and t-shirts, and being at the conference desk to answer all questions about EuroPython, session chairing or helping as room manager.
We also have some perks for you, to give something back. Please check our volunteers page for details.
We are very pleased to have MongoDB as Keystone Sponsor for EuroPython 2019. You can visit them at the most central booth in our exhibit area on the second floor in the Congress Center Basel (CCB), and take the opportunity to chat with their staff and learn more about the MongoDB eco-system.
Please find below a hosted blog post from MongoDB.
MongoDB is the leading modern, general-purpose database platform, designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build. We have architected our database to cater to the needs of modern-day applications from the ground-up with built-in support for high availability through sophisticated replication with self-healing recovery and horizontal scalability through native sharding. MongoDB Atlas is our fully-automated database-as-a-service offering, engineered and run by the same team that builds the database. At MongoDB, it is our mission to make data ridiculously easy to work with and we love, love, LOVE Python because it helps us do exactly that.
To bring the power of MongoDB to the Python ecosystem, we’ve developed PyMongo - the Python driver for MongoDB. With over 3 million downloads per month, PyMongo is one of our most popular drivers. Our Driver team also maintains Motor - an asynchronous Python driver for MongoDB and PyMODM - our object-document mapper. While Python is an important and popular tool for our users, it is also an integral part of developer workflows across our engineering teams. Our Documentation team, for instance, maintains the Giza library which is used to render the entire official MongoDB documentation. Our Education team builds MongoDB University with Django and uses PyMODM and MongoDB Atlas to store application data. The University site has over 1 million registered users and over 100,000 active users per month–all powered by MongoDB. Python is also an integral part of our CI/CD process used to test our core database and all drivers.
Join us at our workshop where we will teach you how to harness the power of MongoDB Atlas to build a highly-available CRUD application using Flask and PyMongo. You will learn more about MongoDB’s document data model, how we ensure high-availability and best practices for building applications using MongoDB. We will also showcase how to build the same application in MongoDB Stitch - our serverless platform. Bring your laptops!
MongoDB is proud to support the Python community. In the past, we have sponsored conferences such as PyCon and PyGotham, and also hosted meetups such as PyLadies. Drop by our booth (#10) to say ‘hi’ to our awesome team and to learn more about Python at MongoDB! You can also join the conversation with other MongoDB and Python community members in our Community Slack Workspace. Register at http://launchpass.com/mongo-d or login at http://mongo-db.slack.com.
Most of us work too much and play too little. When was the last time you smiled at something you made? Playing with fun datasets, especially big data sets, opens up weird new forms of technical recreation. Why not train an amusing model in a browser tab while you’re waiting for that day-job Spark query to finish? I’ll show you some data toys I’ve built using AI and interesting data sets: Most of them involve both backend data science and front-end visualization tricks. They range from poetry-composition helpers to game log analysis to image deconstruction and reconstruction. All of them taught me something, often about myself and what I like artistically, and sometimes about what “big data” actually means.
About Lynn Cherny
Lynn Cherny has had a distinguished career working in user research, data mining, and UX design at companies ranging from early internet startups like Excite.com to Adobe and Autodesk and Solidworks. Lynn was awarded a Knight Fellowship to the University of Miami in 2015, where she taught interactive data analysis and visualization courses. She also developed and taught introductory data science and NLP courses at EM-Lyon, a French business school, for 3 years. Lynn has written 2 books about early Internet communities and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in Linguistics and an M.Phil. from Cambridge University in Computational Linguistics. She is regularly invited to speak at technical conferences on topics related to AI, Python, and data visualization. Lynn currently consults on AI and data science from Lyon, France; she is active on twitter as @arnicas.
AI in Contemporary Art
Over the past couple of years, there has been increasing interest in applying the latest advances in machine learning to creative projects in art and design. From DeepDream and style transfer to a GAN-generated painting selling for $430,000 at auction, AI art has moved beyond the world of research and academia and become a trend in its own right. Meanwhile, the contemporary art world’s fascination with the social impact of facial recognition, recommendation systems and deep fakes has encouraged artists to explore AI critically as subject matter. This talk will give an overview of how artists and technologists are using and thinking about machine learning, its creative potential and societal impact.
About Luba Elliott
Luba Elliott is a curator, artist and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in the creative industries. She is currently working to educate and engage the broader public about the latest developments in creative AI through monthly meetups, talks and tech demonstrations. This year, she is curating Impakt Festival in October, themed on post-truth and AI. As curator, she organised workshops and exhibitions on art and AI for The Photographers’ Gallery, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Google. Prior to that, she worked in start-ups, including the art collector database Larry’s List. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and has a certificate in Design Thinking from the Hasso-Plattner-Institute D-school in Potsdam.
Why You Should Pursue Public Speaking and How to Get There
Fear of public speaking is the most common of all phobias. Want to speak confidently in front of the crowd? This talk shares tips on how to overcome the fear, and ways to get started. You will be prepared to brace presenting from a team meeting to a conference.
About Yenny Cheung
Originally from Hong Kong, Yenny is a full-stack software engineer at Yelp in Hamburg, Germany. Yenny has recently started her public speaking journey, so she still remembers how it was like to have stage fright. Since then, she has had the experience delivering keynotes and speaking at conferences like Europython, European Women in Tech, and PyCon.DE. She was also a guest speaker of the “Technical Lessons Learned on Pythonic Refactoring” episode of the Talk Python podcast, which has about 50,000 downloads.
Are women underrepresented in the High Performance Computing (HPC) community?
This study is the first attempt to understand the current gender demographics of the HPC community, and identify potential reasons and ways to tackle the gender imbalance. By listening to the people who constitute the community, the study offers a guideline on what the HPC community should focus on in order to become more attractive, accessible and useful to everyone.
About Athina Frantzana
Athina Frantzana has just completed her PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research focused on gender diversity in the High Performance Computing (HPC) community: the reasons for the gender imbalance, the problems this causes to the community, the benefits of increasing diversity, and the effectiveness of a range of approaches designed to improve gender diversity. She is also a co-founder of the Women in HPC (WHPC) Network and an active member of various organisations and initiatives which promote and support women in STEM. She works tirelessly towards achieving gender equality in STEM through her projects and by organising and participating in conferences, providing mentoring, taking part in outreach activities, writing articles and Wikipedia pages.
Python Performance: Past, Present and Future
Many past optimization projects are now abandoned or stale for different reasons: Unladen Swallow, Pyston, Pyjion, Gilectomy, etc. Victor also experimented register-based bytecode and FAT Python which he failed to finish. We will see what these projects have achieved, but also try to understand why they didn’t complete. One common issue is the backward compatibility, especially the compatibility with C extensions.
Python now has a performance benchmark suite to track performance over time. There are mature solutions to optimize performance bottlenecks and works around the GIL limitation. PyPy is a drop-in replacement for CPython: it is way faster, fully compatible, and is now more efficient to handle C extensions (PyPy cpyext). Cython is a good compromise between speed and development time: it uses a syntax close to Python but emit faster machine code. multiprocessing makes easy to scale an application on multiple CPUs, and it supports shared memory since Python 3.8. asyncio is another approach to maximize CPU utilization using concurrency for I/O (ex: network and database connections).
The pickle has also been optimized in Python 3.8 (version 5) to reduce or even avoid memory copies. For scientific computation like numpy, numba and pythran can emit efficient code using SIMD instructions and GPGPU. There are also multiple on-going experimental projects. For example, the PEP 554 proposes to have multiple interpreter instances, called “sub-interpreters”, per process, and run them in parallel: no single process-wide lock, but one lock per interpreter. The C API used by C extensions is also being reworked to hide implementation details and provide better forward compatibility. In the long term, it may unlock many new optimizations in CPython, and it may even allow to use the same C extension binary for CPython and PyPy.
About Victor Stinner
Victor Stinner is a Python core developer for 9 years. He is paid by Red Hat to maintain Python upstream (python.org) and downstream (RHEL, Fedora). Author of pyperf, faulthandler and tracemalloc modules, he is working on Python performance (https://speed.python.org/), security (http://python-security.readthedocs.io/ website) and stability (member of the Night’s Watch, maintain Python CIs: Travis CI, AppVeyor, and the large fleet of buildbot workers). He is also mentoring Python contributors.
The
mobile app gives you access to the conference schedule (even offline),
helps you in planing your conference experience (create your personal schedule with reminders) and provides a rich
social engagement platform for all attendees.
You can create a profile within the app or link this to your existing
social accounts, share messages and photos, and easily reach out to
other fellow attendees - all from within the app.
Vital for all EuroPython 2019 attendees
We will again use the conference app to keep you updated by sending updates of the schedule and inform you of important announcements via push
notifications, so please consider downloading it.
Please note that the schedule may still change in details, but the overall layout is fixed now.
Book your EuroPython 2019 Ticket
Please make sure you book your ticket in the coming days. We will switch to late bird rates next week.
If you want to attend the training sessions, please buy a training pass in addition to your conference ticket, or get a combined ticket. We only have very few training seats left.
Travel & accommodation tips
Since we’re close the conference, Basel is in high demand. If you’re having problems finding a hotel, please also consider searching for apartments on the well known booking sites.
We have collected a number of recommendations for accommodation and travel to Basel on the EuroPython 2019 website. If you get a hotel or apartment in Basel, you will additionally get a BaselCard for your stay, which allows you to use public transport in Basel for free. Please see our accommodation page for details.
If you’re new to Python, you should come to our friendly, welcoming and
helpful Beginners’ Day Workshop. We cater to new Pythonistas of all
levels: from absolute beginners through to experienced programmers
encountering Python for the first time.
What is Beginners’ Day ?
Beginners’ day welcomes and supports folks who are new to Python
programming. It takes place on Tuesday 9th July, from 9:30 - 16:00 at the workshop venue,
FHNW Campus Muttenz. Just in time to get you ready for all the
talks which follow on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday ! It’s also a great
place to make friends with fellow attendees and figure out how to get
the most out of EuroPython.
Bring your laptop, because this will be a hands-on session!
The day will start with workshops to give you the chance to try out
Python in lots of different situations: making a game, creating a
website, programming embedded devices or telling stories with data (in a
Jupyter notebook). Later in the day you’ll have an opportunity to
further explore those aspects of Python which appeal to you with the
support of a team of experienced and helpful mentors. We’ll end the day
with a question and answer session about Python, EuroPython and the
wider Python ecosystem.
The emphasis will be in creating a fun,
supportive and useful path into the Python programming language and its
community.
Sign up for Beginners’ Day
You will need a conference pass to attend, but otherwise, it’s free, so
if you’re thinking of coming to the conference, but you’re new to Python
or programming, this could be the session for you.
The session will be presented in English (although our mentors will typically speak a few other languages as well).
If you’d like to come, please do register in advance for this session,
so that we know how to plan to make it the best yet. We need to know the
numbers for planing the workshop.
The workshop is being organised by experienced Python programmer and
educator, Nicholas H.Tollervey.
Already know Python? Do you value working in an open, inclusive and
collaborative way? Want to develop your mentorship skills? Fantastic!
We’re looking for folks with the technical skills, patience, humour and
empathy to work with beginners who may come from a wide variety of
backgrounds and levels of experience. It’s rewarding, fun and a great
way to give back to the community.
We’d especially love to hear from you if you can add an extra language
to help non-English speakers feel comfortable asking questions, or if
you’ve never mentored before and want to try to share your knowledge for
the first time. This is a supportive environment for both beginner
programmers AND beginner mentors. :-)
The EuroPython Society (EPS) does not only run the EuroPython conference, but also aims to provide help for the Python community in Europe in general.
Let’s all meet at EuroPython
In addition to the Python Organizers Lunch (see previous post), which focuses on conference organizers, we are also establishing a program to support attendees of Python user groups and conferences in Europe.
We’d like to invite all of you to EuroPython 2019 this year. Of course, we cannot give out free tickets to everyone, but we can at least recognize your participation in the Python community by giving out discounts for the conference.
Discounts for EuroPython Tickets
If you are running a Python event (conference or user group) in Europe, please reach out to board@europython.eu to request a coupon code for your group, which you can then pass on to your group members or attendees.
If you are not running a user group or conference, but a regular attendee of one, please contact your organizers to have them submit a request. We can only distribute codes at the user group and conference organizer level.
The coupon codes are valid for conference tickets bought starting today and will give you a 10% discount on the ticket price (both regular and late bird prices). The codes are setup for user group sizes of between 30-50 members, but we are also extending this to organizers and attendees of larger conferences. If you need a code valid for larger groups, please mention this in your email.
As you may know, the EuroPython Society (EPS) has extended it’s mission to not only run the EuroPython conference, but also provide help for the Python community in Europe in general.
As part of this, we would like to get to know, and help create closer ties between organizers of other European Python events.
Organizers’ Lunch
We would like to invite representatives of all European Python conference to EuroPython 2019 to join us for an organizers’ lunch. We’re planing the lunch for Thursday or Friday. Details will be announced closer to the event.
Our aim is to get to know each other, exchange experience in organizing events and to find out how we, as EPS, can most effectively help other conferences going forward.
Free Tickets
To support and facilitate this, we are giving out one free conference ticket per conference team, so that each team can send a representative to the organizers’ lunch.
If your team wants to send someone to join, please write to board@europython.eu, mentioning the conference you’re organizing and some background on your team.
Usually, we try to have something as surprise for our attendees every year. However, for this year’s conference, we have decided to give our attendees something to play with and this needs a little more preparation than a bottle or a beach towel.
Drum roll… crowd screaming… and here it is: we’re please to present the…
EuroPython 2019 PewPew Game Console
The device was created and designed by Radomir Dopieralski, a long time EuroPython regular and enthusiastic Python device and robotics builder.
The PewPew is a simplified game console, programmable with CircuitPython, a variant of MicroPython. It comes with a 64 LED display and a set of small buttons to drive the console.
We will have one device per attendee with training or conference ticket and plan to give them out together with the badges.
Free Workshops
To teach you how to program the consoles and help with any questions you may have, we have arranged a special workshop room on the training days Monday and Tuesday, where Radomir and his team will run workshops focusing on the PewPew. You will learn how to write small programs and games.
Our hope is that you will take this knowledge home and spread the word about how much fun Python is – especially for younger users.
The workshops are free for EuroPython conference or training ticket holders, but please see our notes on catering on the training days.
Help us run the workshops
Since Radomir needs help with running the workshops, we are reaching out to you with this blog post. If you are interested in embedded Python, hardware hacking, game development
and similar topics, we invite you to come help us running those workshops.
This is a great opportunity to meet with Python developers and learn together,
and we’re sure you will have great fun while helping other attendees. Whether it’s
just lending a hand getting things working, or running a whole workshop –
it’s up to you, either way we will greatly appreciate your help.
