“As a long time attendee of Europython, I was eagerly expecting this year’s edition even if its form changed radically.
The first thing that struck me is the amazing organization that was put in place using Discord and Zoom.
Also, since one of my talk proposals was also accepted (which you can watch below), I had the chance to experience the speaker side of the Europython organization which was even more impressive. The organisers made sure to think of everything!
In theory, a lot of technical problems could have happened but the conference went on very smoothly in my opinion.
That being said, a lot of us -which I’m surely part of- missed the hallway chats, meeting friends that you only see once a year in person, and making new encounters randomly from side conversations. That social part is something we need to learn to do better online,as it was a first time for a lot of us!
I found the scheduled talks interesting and pretty diverse. Maybe we still miss a bunch of more intermediate/advanced talks but I like to think that Europython is an easy conference to get into.
Here’s a few highlights of talks that I found interesting:
- Python Memory Management 101, by J.M. Ortega : especially the “Best practices for memory management” part
- ScanAPI, by Camila Maia : a cool DevOps approach on APIs which can become very promising if it makes it possible to automate API tests from a fastAPI documented endpoint
- Everything You Know About MongoDB is Wrong, by Mark Smith : Mark, who works for MongoDB now, admitted publicly that MongoDB sharded clusters are to be avoided. It was one of my personal momentum because I stood up and said the same in my talk at Scylla Summit 2019 and got quite some interesting discussions out of it.
I certainly hope Europython 2021 will be held in person, as planned, in Dublin. But if it’s not, I’ll still be part of it with great pleasure!
I want to thank the organizers, attendees and sponsors (which Numberly was once again part of) who made this year’s edition a success!”
Alexys Jacob-Monier
