What we did at EuroPython

July 28, 2016

We spent last week at EuroPython 2016, in the beautiful Spanish city of Bilbao.

This year, EuroPython was host to more than 1100 participants. It’s quite a feat for a team of volunteers to organise an eight-day event for more than a thousand people, with as many as ten parallel sessions.

This is what the conference schedule looked like, just to give you an idea how packed the eight days were:

Despite the scale and complexity of the conference, the experience for attendees was excellent, and many congratulations are due to the organisers not simply for making it happen, but for making it happen so well.

We played our part too, with our two talks, a workshop and a help-desk.

Our talks, by Daniele Procida:

And notes from the Docker workshop led by Stefan Foulis.

It’s wonderful to be part of a community as open and friendly as the world of Python. EuroPython featured talks on almost every topic imaginable (including some that we wouldn’t have been able to imagine until we’d heard them) and a vast offering of workshops and tutorials in which people shared their skills and knowledge with others.

Naturally, the conference food was what you’d expect in the Basque country (excellent) while the pintxos bars of Bilbao were full of Pythonistas until late every night.

New things we learned

The EuroPython website runs on django CMS! We had no idea (a note to our friends in Python: if you’re using django CMS for something interesting, tell us! We’d love to know, and we may even be able to help). In fact the site uses a number of applications, integrated into django CMS , that between them comprise a complete conference website system to handle everything: attendee registration, the call for papers, talk voting and reviews and more.
Gravitational waves were discovered using Python.
The UK’s National Grid uses Python to balance electricity usage and production across the country, matching the output of 180+ power stations to the needs of 65 million people and all of the UK’s industry, multiple times each second.
There’s almost nothing people don’t decide to do in Python. It might not always be the best or most elegant choice, but it’s typically the one they feel most comfortable with and gets the quickest results - which is what really matters. Data visualisation, robotics and embedded programming, brewing beer: the applications are endless, and talk after talk introduced a new one.

See you next year

Thanks to everyone who came to our talks, workshop and the django CMS helpdesk or the Aldryn Cloud platform. It’s a pleasure to see that django CMS remains at the heart of the Python/Django community and that it continues to be a firm choice for Python programmers who want a website.

The location for 2017’s EuroPython has yet to be decided, but we hope to be there too - see you there!

In the meantime..

If you want to know more about django CMS, join us online.

If you’re an experienced Python programmer, you can get using it right away, or jump straight in to participating in the community and its development.

For those who need more introduction, we have a series of tutorials that take you step-by-step all the way, aimed specifically at beginners.

Finally, we also offer free guided tours each week: 60 minutes in the company of a django CMS developer, who will show and explain just how quickly you can get started with a new customised django CMS site.

Stay tuned on Twitter for brief updates and news.