Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, to share with the fantastic European Python community in PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2023. This was a 3-day event filled with conferences, with topics ranging from data science to straight-up Python development talks and workshops. PyCon is an international conference that happens in several places around the globe and brings together the latest Python language and ecosystem tools. In this case, and for the second year in a row, it also brought the PyData educational program, which focuses on the community for open-source data tools.
This was the first Python international conference I participated in, and one of the main things I noticed and enjoyed was how open this community is to newcomers. Even though I was 10,000 kilometers away from home, I felt this sense of belonging since this community welcomes you with open arms regardless of your background and proficiency level with the language.
Before presenting my talk on the final day of the event, I had the opportunity to attend several interesting talks and workshops. Everything started with an opening session that helped set some ground rules about the event, shared numbers about the attendees, and some information about the talk proposals evaluated for the event. Seeing how much traction the Python language has nowadays and how many wonderful communities are gathered around it is eye-opening.
There are so many interesting topics and brilliant speakers that it’s virtually impossible to attend all of the talks in a 3-day span. Thankfully, the event organizers have made all the talks public on YouTube, which you can check out on the PyData official YouTube channel. To summarize some of my favorite talks, I enjoyed listening to Alexander C. S. Hendorf on how FastAPI was conceived and built over the past five years and the roadblocks and challenges the product experienced in its development cycle. Later, I attended a talk on Data Science Profiling by Cheuk Ting Ho. Even as a Data Science beginner, Cheuk’s talk was so smooth and straightforward that it helped me easily grasp some unknown concepts in this domain. Finally, a talk that resonated with me was about using GitHub’s pull requests as a tool to give and receive feedback. David Andersson gave practical examples of mentoring other team members through meaningful and empathetic suggestions. We use this at Stack Builders daily, helping us organically grow our team and maintaining our client relationships through valuable interactions.
On day three, I shared my talk with the community, presenting some real-world techniques used to create distributed systems while dealing with the uncertainty and brittleness of communication networks. While this talk could potentially be applied to any tech stack, it used some of my real-world experience building distributed systems with Python and gave some really valuable insights on how to develop your applications reliably.
I enjoyed this event and the networking opportunities it brought, and I can’t wait to approach this community again, given the opportunity. I seriously believe that the advancements that Python has made, both in the development and data fronts, are astounding, and it will definitely keep shaping the industry in the years to come. The community has been and will keep being a key factor to help it move in the right direction.
