EuroPython in 2018 was my first international conference. After five years, I eagerly joined another EuroPython.
I hopped on a night train and woke up with a view of beautiful sunflower fields near Prague. With the conference starting the next day, I had some spare time to explore the charming city. In the evening I joined a dinner with fellow conference attendees for some tasty Czech food and tech discussions.
As engineers, we are often too focused on writing beautiful, optimized, and scalable code using the latest frameworks, libraries, and tools and overlook the true impact of our work.
A talk from Merve Noyan was a good reminder about that. After the devastating earthquake in Turkey a group of volunteers built a map to help coordinate rescue missions and distribution of essential supplies. They built different models that were classifying what kind of help people need and their location. The data was sourced from tweets and Instagram posts containing requests for help. Initially, people posted their locations to be rescued from collapsed buildings, but later, the focus shifted to requests for water, shelter, and medicine. It was heartwarming to witness how technology can play a big role in times of crisis.
On the technical front, I liked the tips from Sebastian Buczyński about BDD tests. The key takeaway from the talk was the importance of making Gherkin scripts readable for non-technical individuals, rather than writing technical step-by-step instruction script.
F-Strings in Python are getting an improvement. Pablo Galindo Salgado and Marta Gomez explained the current limitations of f-strings and took us through the journey of enhancing implementation. The current parser has certain restrictions, disallowing writing arbitrary Python code inside curly braces. For instance, f”hello {‘\n’} world” is currently considered invalid. In python 3.12 the f-strings will allow any python code including nesting the f-strings. (That doesn’t mean you should do it 🙂 ).
Hopefully see you again at EuroPython (sooner than in 5 years)!
