Some more last-minute news and tips for attendees. Be sure to check our attendee tips page for more information.

Bilbao tram service on strike

Just like in Berlin last year, there will be some inconvenience due to strikes in Bilbao. The Bilbao tram service has been on strike since July 15th and it may well last until the end of Summer.

The tram services will stop from 11:55 - 14.00 and 17:55 - 20.00 CEST each day and only maintain minimum service at other times.

See “Paralizado el servicio de tranvía en Bilbao por huelga de sus trabajadores” for more details (in Spanish).

We had originally wanted to provide free public transport for attendees, but given the strikes during conference rush hours, we decided to drop this.

Note that buses and the metro will still operate as usual.

Great weather

You will not only benefit from excellent talks, but also receive lots of Vitamin D in Bilbao. The weather forecast for the week is excellent: lots of sunshine and between 28°-30° Celsius.

So while the tram is on strike, you can walk and get an ice cream instead of a tram ticket.

Speaker preparations

If you are a speaker, please read the nice guide written by Harry Percival:

• Tips for speakers

In particular, please check your talk time. The session chairs will have to make sure that all speakers only use the assigned talk time, so that the tracks don’t run out of sync.

There are also some important technical things to prepare your talk at the conference:

• test your notebook with the projector in the room where you will be holding your talk
• make sure you have the right VGA adapters with you
• make sure the projector resolution is supported by your notebook

It’s best to do all of the above a few hours or a day before your talk. In case of problems, you can then try to find alternative solutions, e.g. borrow someone’s notebook for the talk.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

We are pleased to announce the official guidebook for the EuroPython 2015 conference:

We will regularly issue updates to the guidebook when there are changes in schedule.

Available for all platforms

This is available in several flavors:

• for mobile phones as native apps for iOS and Android
• for browsers as web app

The native apps have the advantage of allowing to use the guidebook in offline mode. Once you have the Guidebook app installed, search for “EuroPython 2015” and download the guide.

Nice Features

• Maps of the venue
• Full schedule
• Create your personal schedule (My Schedule)
  
• Watch Twitter updates and tweet right in the guidebook
• Contact other attendees who have sign in to the guidebook
  
• Useful information (Contacts, CoC, FAQ, City Infos, etc.)
  
• Offline use (for the native apps)

More information and QR codes are available on our mobile schedule page.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

EuroPython is not the only attraction in Bilbao to attend in July. The city also hosts the famous Guggenheim Museum, featuring modern art in an amazing building designed by Frank O. Gehry.

See below for a special deal we have available for the Guggenheim.

You can also find the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, with exhibitions of Tucker and 50s fashion in France, in addition to other masterpieces. It is very close to the conference venue.

We have compiled more information about these two museums on these pages:

• Guggenheim Museum

• Fine Arts Museum

>>> Special Deal for EuroPython Attendees

If you want to avoid long queues at the Guggenheim Museum, you can benefit from getting a ticket at the conference desk.

We have acquired a block of 100 tickets and will give them away for free, if you donate at least EUR 10 to the EuroPython conference financial aid budget for next year.

That’s less than the regular ticket price and you get the additional warm fuzzy feeling of helping others as bonus :-)

Donations can be made in cash at the conference desk.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

EuroPython will start next week. We will issue a number of blog posts with helpful tips and reminders this week to warm you up and also collect them on our page “Tips for attendees”.

Contacting fellow attendees

We have enabled a functionality on the website’s “Who’s coming” page, which lets you quickly send emails to other attendees who have opted in to receive messages from EuroPython attendees. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to the “Who’s coming” page
2. Find the attendee you’d like to contact
3. Click on the envelope icon on the attendee’s badge
4. Write the message and click “Send”

The message will be sent by the conference system. You don’t have to know the attendee’s email address.

The envelope icon will only appear for those attendees who have enabled receiving such messages in their privacy settings.

Please update your profile

In order to print badges and streamline the process of handing them out at the conference, we need your name for the ticket.

Please make sure you have entered all the necessary details on your profile page. This will save us a lot of work and you a lot of long queues.

Attendee wiki

We have set up a wiki page for attendees to self-organize and give other attendees helpful tips:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/EuroPython2015

The wiki page is hosted on the Python.org wiki. If you want to edit the page, please see the front page for instructions (near the bottom of the page).

Planing and advertising sprints

If you are planing on running a sprint, you can enter the details on the sprints wiki page:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/EuroPython2015/Sprints

The editing process is the same as for the main EuroPython 2015 wiki page (see above).

More details on the EuroPython 2015 sprints are available on the sprints page.

Printing posters

If you are running a poster at the conference, you can either bring your poster with you or just take a PDF to one of the many printing shops in Bilbao to get it printed on site:

• Yelp listing of print shops

Two recommendations from the on-site team:

• Reprografía José Antonio
  
• Goya - Google Maps

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

Many of our sponsors are looking for new employees, so EuroPython 2015 is not only an exciting conference, but may very well also be your chance to find the perfect job you’ve always been looking for.

Sponsor job board

We will post sponsor recruiting offers on the job board of our website:

Sponsor recruiting messages

If you want to receive the sponsor messages directly to your inbox, please log in to the website and enable the recruiting message option in your privacy settings.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

With Mandy Waite we have announced all keynotes for EuroPython 2015: 5 keynotes, 6 speakers, 4 women and 2 men.

Keynote Schedule

• Monday: Ola Sendecka & Ola Sitarska
• Tuesday: Guido van Rossum
• Wednesday: Holger Krekel
  
• Thursday: Carrie Anne Philbin
  
• Friday: Mandy Waite

More details about the keynotes are available on the EuroPython 2015 Keynotes page.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

We are pleased to introduce our final keynote speaker for EuroPython 2015: Mandy Waite. She will be giving her keynote on Friday, July 24.

About Mandy Waite

Mandy works at Google as a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud Platform and to make the world a better place for developers building applications for the Cloud:

“I came to Google from Sun Microsystems where I worked with partners on performance and optimisation of large scale applications and services before moving on to building an ecosystem of Open Source applications for OpenSolaris. In my spare time I’m learning Japanese and play the guitar.”

The Keynote: So, I have all these Docker containers, now what?

You’ve solved the issue of process-level reproducibility by packaging up your apps and execution environments into a number of Docker containers. But once you have a lot of containers running, you’ll probably need to coordinate them across a cluster of machines while keeping them healthy and making sure they can find each other. Trying to do this imperatively can quickly turn into an unmanageable mess! Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could declare to your cluster what you want it to do, and then have the cluster assign the resources to get it done and to recover from failures and scale on demand?

Kubernetes (http://kubernetes.io) is an open source, cross platform cluster management and container orchestration platform that simplifies the complex tasks of deploying and managing your applications in Docker containers. You declare a desired state, and Kubernetes does all the work needed to create and maintain it. In this talk, we’ll look at the basics of Kubernetes and at how to map common applications to these concepts. This will include a hands-on demonstration and visualization of the steps involved in getting an application up and running on Kubernetes.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

We are pleased to introduce our next keynote speaker for EuroPython 2015: Holger Krekel. He will be giving a keynote on Wednesday, July 22.

About Holger Krekel

Holger is a prolific Python developer with a strong interest in communication:

“Socially this means engaging and co-organizing neighborhoods and technically it means i am interested in distributed systems and thriving to make available and built better communication machines for other people.”

He also is a proud father and loves to dance to “electronic swing” music.

Python projects

You will probably know Holger as author of the well-known pytest testing framework and co-founder the PyPy project:

“When i discovered Python I was thrilled by its high-level constructs and introspection facilities. I am still thrilled by the idea of dynamically deploying and executing high level programs on the net. In my view, Python and testing are a wonderfully productive combination for writing software. Out of this conviction, I founded and co-developed the PyPy project and maintain the pytest and tox testing tools. I also maintain a number of other projects, among the more popular are execnet for ad-hoc cross-interpreter communication and the py lib.  Most of my code you find at bitbucket/hpk42.”

The coding culture in almost all his projects consists of test- and documentation-driven development and applying meta programming techniques.

The Keynote: Towards a more effective, decentralized web

In this talk, Holger will discuss the recent rise of immutable state concepts in languages and network protocols:

“The advent of hash-based data structures and replication strategies are shaking the client/server web service paradigm which rests on managing mutable state through HTTP.  By contrast, building on git, bittorrent and other content addressed data structures provides for a more secure, efficient decentralized communication topology. There are projects, thoughts and talk to create new web standards to bring such technologies to mass deployment and fuel a new wave of decentralization.  What can Python bring to the table?”

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

We are pleased to introduce our next keynote speaker for EuroPython 2015: Carrie Anne Philbin. She will be giving her keynote on Thursday, July 23, to start the EuroPython Educational Summit.

About Carrie Anne Philbin

Carrie Anne is leading the education mission for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but is also known as an award winning secondary Computing & ICT Teacher, Author, YouTuber:

• Author of “Adventures in Raspberry Pi”, a computing book for teenagers wanting to get started with Raspberry Pi and programming. Winner of Teach Secondary magazine’s Technology & Innovation Best Author award 2014.
  
• Creator of a YouTube video series for teenage girls called “The Geek Gurl Diaries“, which has won a Talk Talk Digital Hero Award. The episodes include interviews with women working in technology and hands on computer science based tutorials.
• Vice chair of the Computing At Schools (CAS) initiative to get more girls and minority groups into computing, which created a workshop based hack day for teenagers concentrating on delivering good content to include all and ‘Hack the Curric’ bringing academics, educators and industry experts together to create inclusive resources for the new Computing curriculum.

In 2012, she became a Google Certified Teacher and KS3 ICT subject Leader at a school in East London. She has a blended and open approach to teaching as can be seen on her website ICT with Miss P. She became a Skype Moment Maker and ambassador for technology. She is an evangelist and often speaks at conferences like BETT, Raspberry Jamboree, YRS, PyCon UK and now EuroPython.

The Keynote: Designed for Education: A Python Solution

The problem of introducing children to programming and computer science has seen growing attention in the past few years. Initiatives like Raspberry Pi, Code Club, code.org, (and many more) have been created to help solve this problem. With the introduction of a national computing curriculum in the UK, teachers have been searching for a text based programming language to help teach computational thinking as a follow on from visual languages like Scratch.

The educational community has been served well by Python, benefiting from its straight-forward syntax, large selection of libraries, and supportive community. Education-focused summits are now a major part of most major Python Conferences. Assistance in terms of documentation and training is invaluable, but perhaps there are technical means of improving the experience of those using Python in education. Clearly the needs of teachers and their students are different to those of the seasoned programmer. Children are unlikely to come to their teachers with frustrations about the Global Interpreter Lock! But issues such as usability of IDEs or comprehensibility of error messages are of utmost
importance.

In this keynote, Carrie Anne will discuss existing barriers to Python becoming the premier language of choice for teaching computer science, and how learning Python could be helped immensely through tooling and further support from the Python developer community.

EuroPython Educational Summit

We will have Educational Summit focused talks, trainings, birds of a feather sessions to debate and also Educational Sprints for the building of education focused projects during the weekend.

EuroPython 2015 Educational Summit

Please see the summit announcement for more details.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team

EuroPython is organized and run by volunteers from the Python community, but we’re only a few and we will need more help to make the conference run smoothly.

We need your help !

We will need help with the conference and registration desk, giving out the swag bags and t-shirts, session chairing, entrance control, set up and tear down, etc.

Perks for Volunteers

In addition to endless fame and glory as official EuroPython Volunteer, we have also added some real-life few perks for you:

• We will grant each volunteer a compensation of EUR 22 per shift
• Volunteers will be eligible for student house rooms we have available and can use their compensation to pay for these
• Get an awesome EuroPython Volunteer T-Shirt that you can keep and show off to your friends :-)

Register as Volunteer

Please see our EuroPython Volunteers page for details and the registration form:

If you have questions, please write to our helpdesk@europython.eu.

Hope to see you in Bilbao :-)

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2015 Team