We would like to draw your attention to the following sessions by the EuroPython Society and the Python Software Foundation, two of our Python community organizations working for you.
EuroPython Society Sessions
The EuroPython Society (EPS) is organizing the EuroPython conference series and working with the EuroPython Workgroups and the on-site teams to run EuroPython conferences.
Each year, we are running our General Assembly at the conference, reporting on our activities and, probably more interesting for many of you, a session to introduce the organization concepts we’re using to run these conferences.
Both sessions are open to all EuroPython attendees.
If you’d like to join us with the organization, please attend the EuroPython 2016 session. You can also become a member of the EPS and then vote at the General Assembly.
Python Software Foundation Session
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is the organization behind Python itself. It holds the IP rights, runs PyCon US and tries to help the Python community world-wide to run events, user groups, workshops or Python related programming projects by giving out grants.
This year, we’re again having a PSF Members meeting at EuroPython, where the PSF reports on its activities, new plans and organizational changes.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
