EuroPython 2018 Keynotes

We are proud to present several interesting keynotes at this year's EuroPython:

PyPI: Past, Present and Future by Nicole Harris

The Python Package Index (PyPI) is the principal repository of software packages for the Python programming language.

In May 2018, PyPI served 12.3 billion HTTP requests, with 1.4 million people visiting pypi.org via their web browser.

The Python community depends on PyPI for the ongoing functioning of the entire Python ecosystem.

About Nicole

Nicole Harris is the lead designer and HTML/CSS developer on the Warehouse project - the new codebase powering the Python Package Index (PyPI). Through her work on Warehouse, Nicole is also a member of the Python Packaging Authority and Python Packaging Working Group.

Nicole currently leads the UX and UI teams at PeopleDoc, where she works closely with designers, developers and product owners to deliver better experiences for all PeopleDoc users.

Nicole originates from Australia, but now lives in Perth, Scotland.

How to Ignore Most Startup Advice and Build a Decent Software Business by Ines Montani

It's a great time to be a software developer. Platforms are steadily becoming more mature, useful tools are released almost daily and things that seemed hopelessly futuristic only a few years ago are suddenly commercially viable. Despite this, the software world is awash with bullshit. The success of the largest technology companies has led to a very skewed set of lessons. This narrow focus is amplified by the venture capital industry and the fact that nobody really knows what's going to happen next.

The good news is, none of this actually matters. The basics of creating something useful and selling it for money remain the same. In this talk, I'm not going to give you "one weird trick" or tell you to ~* just follow your dreams *~. But I'll share some of the things we've learned from building a successful software company around commercial developer tools and our open-source library spaCy.

About Ines

Ines is the co-founder of Explosion AI, a digital studio specialising in tools for AI technology. She's a core developer of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for Natural Language Processing in Python and Prodigy, a new data annotation tool powered by active learning. Before founding Explosion AI, she was a freelance front-end developer and strategist, using her four years executive experience in ad sales and digital marketing.

Citizen Science with Python by Ian Ozsvald

You could make a difference in the world with a little science and Python. We'll look at several data-driven humanitarian and healthcare projects developed using Python and, all going well, run some audience experiments. By the end of the talk I hope you'll be looking to run your own experiments with the scientific Python stack.

About Ian

Ian co-organises the annual PyDataLondon conference with 500+ attendees and the associated 7,000+ member monthly meetup. He runs the established ModelInsight.io Data Science consultancy in London, gives conference talks internationally including as keynote speaker and is the author of the bestselling O'Reilly book High Performance Python.

He has 16 years of experience as a senior technical leader, data scientist and coach.

White Mars: living far away from any form of life by Marco Buttu

Concordia Station is a French/Italian facility located inside Antarctica, in a plateau called Dome-C, in the middle of nowhere. A dark and cold place: no Sun from May to August, temperatures around -80 Celsius degress, no life. Here I am living and performing scientific research with other 12 collegues from Italy, France and Austria. We are the most isolated people on Earth, more than the austronauts in the International Space Station. There is no way to move from Concordia until November, and no one can come. It is like to live in another planet, and that is why the European Space Agency is interested in making bio-medical research on us, in order to better understand how the human body behaves in a such extraterrestrial environment. We will introduce our studies, describe this place and our life here, and of course also speak about Python.

About Marco

Marco Buttu works for the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, leading the control software development for the Sardinia Radio Telescope, one of the biggest single-dish world's telescopes.  He is a Python addicted, but currently he is not able to contribute to his preferred programming language because of his unusual condition. He is living in the most isolated place on Earth, totally dark for three months, with temperatures around -80 Celsius degrees. An extraterrestial environment without any form of life around. He is looking at the marvellous Antarctic sky trough a telescope and dreaming to go to Mars.

Die Threads by David Beazley

In the brave new world of async, threads are now a thing of the past. Or are they not?

About David

David Beazley is the author of the Python Essential Reference, 4th Edition (Addison-Wesley) and Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition (O'Reilly).  He has been using Python since 1996.