EuroPython Blog

The official blog of everything & anything EuroPython! EuroPython 2024 8-14 July, Prague & Remote
EuroPython Blog

Featured talk "Support Python 2 and 3 with the same code"

The talk “Support Python 2 and 3 with the same code“ will be given by Stefan Schwarzer.

With the upcoming importance of Python 3 there is a growing need for both migrating existing Python 2 modules to Python 3 but also maintaining the code for Python 2. There are several approaches for dealing with Python code that must be compatible for both Python 2 and Python 3. Stefan Schwarzer will show an approach how to maintain the very same code for Python 2 and Python 3 simultaneously while avoiding two dedicated code bases. The talk discusses the main problems when supporting Python 3 and best practices to apply for compatibility with Python 2 and 3.

Dr. Stefan Schwarzer uses Python since the last millennium and he has published multiple articles and a book on Python and is a regular speaker at Python and Linux conferences. Stefan holds a PhD in chemical engineering but he is working in software development since 2000 and works nowadays as software development freelancer. He is the maintainer of the FTP client library ftputil.

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Featured talk: Python for Zombies: 15.000 enrolled in the first Brazilian MOOC to teach Python

The talk “”Python for Zombies: 15.000 enrolled in the first Brazilian MOOC to teach Python will be given by Fernando Masanori Ashikaga.

Fernando is a university teacher and will talk about his experiences of teaching programming with Python in Brazil MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) and spreading Python in Brazil. Hacking basic modules and classes to obtain the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. A funny way to teach programming.

Fernando Masanori Ashikaga is a professor for communications at the Faculdade de Tecnologia de São Bernardo do Campo in  São Paolo, Brazil.

Featured training "Python for System Administrators"

The training “Python for System Adminstrators” will be given by  Roberto Polli.

The goal is to show how to use python and the Python Standard Library to replace a variegate set of administration tools like grep, sed, awk, perl and gnuplot.

Students should type-in slide contents in their ipython console and share their results. Anyway script templates are provided via github to enable them to paste snippets and reduce idle times.

At the end of the training the students will be able to:

  • gather system data on different platforms;
  • parse them efficiently;
  • make basic statistics like distribution, deviation, aggregation, correlation;
  • plot data;

Roberto works at Babel, migrating big mail infrastructures to open solutions. Develops in Python, C and Java to foster communities around various FLOSS, trying to bring both social and IT innovation.He is a Red Hat Certified Engineer and Virtualization Administrator, but loves maintaining free software, including the caldav java library: caldav4j.

We want you as EuroPython helper: EuroPython helper organization and meeting

EuroPython is searching for helpers and volunteers during the conference event. Please meet with the EuroPython organizer team on 

Thursday, June 12, 2014

http://www.meetup.com/Python-Users-Berlin-PUB/events/165911642/

EuroPython 2014 will be the largest EuroPython conference ever.

The organizer team worked on the project since already one year voluntarily but for the conference even itself we need much more volunteers for various tasks during the conference.

Please help us out and show us your commitment to the Python community.

We want you and we need you!

If you can not make it to the meeting above then please email to helpdesk@europython.eu - every hand is useful - every hand helps us making this conference a success and an unforgettable event for the european Python community.

Featured talk "Message-passing concurrency for Python"

The talk “Message-passing concurrency for Python” will be given by Sarah Mount.

Concurrency and parallelism in Python are always hot topics. This talk will look the variety of forms of concurrency and parallelism. In particular this talk will give an overview of various forms of message-passing concurrency which have become popular in languages like Scala and Go. A Python library called python-csp which implements similar ideas in a Pythonic way will be introduced and we will look at how this style of programming can be used to avoid deadlocks, race hazards and “callback hell”.

Sarah Mount is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Wolverhampton, with particular interests in concurrency, parallelism and dynamic languages.

Keynotes at EuroPython

Here is the final list of keynote speakers at EuroPython 2014

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Pieter Hintjens

Our decentralized future

Pieter will talk about the urgent push towards a decentralized future.  As founder of the ZeroMQ community, he will explain the vision, design and reality of distributed software systems. He’ll explain his view on the community itself, also a highly decentralized “Living System”, as Hintjens calls it. Finally he’ll talk about edgenet, a model for a decentralized Internet. 

About Pieter Hintjens

Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities, which he describes as “Living Systems”. He is an expert in distributed computing, having written many protocols and distributed software systems. He founded the ZeroMQ free software project in 2007, and in 2013 launched the edgenet project to build a fully secure, anonymous peer-to-peer Internet. He is the author of “ZeroMQ - Messaging for Many Applications” (O'Reilly), “Code Connected”, and “Culture and Empire: Digital Revolution”. His blog is at hintjens.com.Constanze Kurz

Constanze Kurz

One year of Snowden, what’s next?

Since June 2013, disclosed by Edward Snowden, we learn more and more facts about American and British spies’ deep appetite for information, economic spying and the methods they use to collect data. They systematically tapped international communications on a scale that only few people could imagine. But what are the consequences for societies when they now know about the NSA metadata repository capable of taking in billions of “events” daily to collected and analyze? Is there a way to defend against an agency with a monstrous secret budget?

About Constanze Kurz

Constanze Kurz works at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin as a computer scientist. She is the spokeswoman of the German Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker group. She is an expert on surveillance techniques and co-author of technical analyses on voting computers, data retention and anti-terror laws for the German Constitutional Court.

Emily Bache

Emily Bache

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. 

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Travis Oliphant

Python’s Role in Big Data Analytics: Past, Present, and Future

Python has had a long history in Scientific Computing which means it has had the fundamental building blocks necessary for doing Data Analysis for many years. As a result, Python has long played a role in scientific problems with the largest data sets. Lately, it has also grown in traction as a tool for doing rapid Data Analysis. As a result, Python is the center of an emerging trend that is unifying traditional High Performance Computing with “Big Data” applications. In this talk I will discuss the features of Python and its popular libraries that have promoted its use in data analytics. I will also discuss the features that are still missing to enable Python to remain competitive and useful for data scientists and other domain experts. Finally, will describe open source projects that are currently occupying my attention which can assist in keeping Python relevant and even essential in Data Analytics for many years to come.

About Travis Oliphant

Travis has a Ph.D. from the Mayo Clinic and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University. Since 1997, he has worked extensively with Python for numerical and scientific programming, most notably as the primary developer of the NumPy package, and as a founding contributor of the SciPy package. He is also the author of the definitive “Guide to NumPy”.

Travis was an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU from 2001-2007, where he taught courses in probability theory, electromagnetics, inverse problems, and signal processing. He also served as Director of the Biomedical Imaging Lab, where he researched satellite remote sensing, MRI, ultrasound, elastography, and scanning impedance imaging.

From 2007-2011, Travis was the President at Enthought, Inc. During his tenure there, the company grew from 15 to 50 employees, and Travis worked with well-known Fortune 50 companies in finance, oil-and-gas, and consumer-products. He was involved in all aspects of the contractual relationship, including consulting, training, code-architecture, and development.

As CEO of Continuum Analytics, Travis engages customers, develops business strategy, and guides technical direction of the company. He actively contributes to software development and engages with the wider open source community in the Python ecosystem.

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Bob Ippolito

What can Python learn from Haskell?

What can we learn from Erlang or Haskell for building reliable high concurrency services? Bob was involved in many Python projects but argues that for some domains there may be better methods found elsewhere. He started looking for alternatives back in 2006 when building high concurrency services at Mochi Media (originally with Twisted), which led him to the land of Erlang and later Haskell. Bob is going to talk about what he learned along the way. In particular, he’ll cover some techniques that are used in functional programming languages and how they can be used to solve problems in more performant, robust and/or concise ways than the standard practices in Python. He is also going to discuss some potential ways that the Python language and its library ecosystem could evolve accordingly.

About Bob Ippolito

Bob Ippolito is an entrepreneur and polyglot open source developer from San Francisco, CA. His open source contributions include the json library for Python, the MochiKit framework for Javascript, and the mochiweb web server for Erlang. He’s founder and former CTO of Mochi Media, Inc. and currently dedicates his time to advising startups and working with non-profits such as Mission Bit and The College Initiative as a volunteer educator.

Featured talk "Rethinking packaging, development and deployment"

The talk “Rethinking packaging, development and deployment” will be given by Domen Kožar.

Packaging Python modules is a topic of its own in the Python world. A full stack of modules like setuptools, release management related tools etc. are available.

Domen Kožar will demonstrate how to replace technologies in the stack like pip, virtualenv, buildout, ansible, jenkins with NixOS. In this talk he will show how to develop and deploy Python projects that can be easily mixed with non-Python dependencies.

NixOS is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, it is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.

Domen Kožar studies electrical engineering and has been a GSOC student for four year (Gentoo, Plone, PylonsProject, PylonsProject). Besides his contributions to the content-management-system Plone he is involved with the development of the ZODB/Pyramid based application server SubstanceD. Domen is proud member of the Kiberpipa hackerspace in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

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Free Django workshop for women at EuroPython!

Django Girls is an initiative that is aiming to introduce 19 women who have never coded before to the world of technology and increase the diversity of European Python community. During EuroPython 2014 in Berlin, we’re going to organize one-day workshops and invite girls from all over Europe to join us and learn how to build the Internet using HTML, CSS, Python and Django.

Workshops will take place on 21st of July, on a first day of annual EuroPython conference. Django Girls is tailored for women who have never programmed – absolute beginners. We believe that IT industry will greatly benefit from bringing more women into technology. We want to make an opportunity for girls to learn how to program and become one of us.

Workshops are free of charge and each participant will receive free tickets to the entire EuroPython conference, courtesy of EuroPython. In addition, if attendee can’t come to Berlin due to financial reasons, but is very motivated to learn and then share their knowledge with others, EuroPython and Django Software Fundation donated funds to help them with travel costs and accommodation.

Application process starts now and ends on 30th June 2014. Applicants will reveice confirmation letters until 4th of July 2014.

Django Girls organizers are looking for coaches and sponsors who can contribute to the event. People and organizations who are interested are very welcome! Every individual who want to financially support Django Girls can buy a special support ticket for EuroPython donating 10, 20, 50 or 100€ for the cause. Sales of these tickets starts 5th June 2014 at 6pm UTC+2.

More information:

Contact to organizers: