I agree to the use of cookies in accordance with the Sourcefabric Privacy Policy.

Support our media development efforts

Please note: due to the quarantine measures required by the coronavirus outbreak, we are unable to answer the phone in our Prague office. Please send an email to contact@sourcefabric.org and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

Search

Who, what, when, where and why

Get the latest news about Sourcefabric software, solutions and ideas.

BACK TO BLOG OVERVIEW

Lessons from EuroPython 2014

Photo by Steven Lek (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Photo by Steven Lek (CC BY-SA 3.0)

EuroPython is the biggest Python conference in Europe and the second-largest in the world, after PyCon in North America. I attended this year’s event in Berlin, July 21-27, along with 1200 other Pythonistas.

Among the talks and training sessions I attended during the week were some covering concurrent programming and scientific computing in Python, while at others I tried to pick up new ideas on how to further improve Sourcefabric’s everyday development.

Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to coding sprints. We divided into teams to hunt down bugs in various software, including Django, NixOS, Plone and PyPy.

For my part, I worked on the Kotti web application framework and made my first modest contribution by proof-reading and revising its beginner's tutorial.

The key topics and ideas I identified that could be of immediate use in Sourcefabric's development processes are the following:

  • Jigna: a Python-Javascript bridge for creating rich user interfaces using HTML, CSS and Javascript. The framework does a two-way binding between HTML widgets and Python models, making it possible for the developers to use their existing web development knowledge, avoiding the need to learn specialized Python UI toolkits.

  • Pytest: a Python testing framework requiring less boilerplate code, with good traceback reporting and the ability to run the tests in parallel. The latter is useful if you have a lot of tests that take some time to run and you want to reduce this time by utilizing more than one processor core.

  • Jedi: a very promising new tool for static analysis of Python code. It understands types, decorators, operations on arrays and lists, etc., allowing for much better (potential) error detection, before the code is even run.

  • Eve: a library for easy implementation of RESTful API services in Python. Sourcefabric uses RESTful APIs a lot, so the Eve library is definitely something to look at.

  • WebRTC: a Javascript API for real-time communication in browsers. Could be used, for instance, to implement in-browser chat applications without the need to route the traffic through a central server. Works in Chrome, Firefox and Opera, but in Safari and in the legacy browser web developers often frown upon.

All in all the event ran very smoothly, so hats off to all the organizers for their efforts and for spoiling us with food, drinks and ice cream throughout the week. The highlight of the program was Wednesday's dinner with accompanying jazz and cabaret performance, followed by live music and a DJ. It’s surprising the next day’s program started only an hour late.

I really enjoyed my week in Berlin, it seemed to had ended much too soon. I am already looking forward to Europython 2015, where I want to hear even more interesting talks and meet with the vibrant Python community again.





BACK TO TOP