PyConWeb is an international Python Web conference held in Munich. Its main purpose is to talk about Web tools and techniques to make the Web even more awesome.
Attending this conference really feels different from the other non-German conferences. The conference is organised and prepared with German precision. Everything was taken care of and the only thing you need to think about is to learn as much as you can and have a good time. And that we did …
The keynote was held by Nicola Iarocci. He talked about his journey in the open source community. I have yet to hear such an inspiring talk regarding open source. He used to be an introvert and he couldn’t speak in public but after his first Python conference (where he also gave his first talk) his world changed. He highlighted the benefits of open source and encouraged listeners to work more with open source.
Next talk I want to mention was by Doug Sillars. He talked about compressing and resizing images on the Web (“Stop Stalling! Delivering Fast Video without the Buffering”). This is what I like so much about these conferences. I must admit I didn’t expect much from this talk because the topic didn’t seem too difficult to me. Boy, was I wrong. Let’s say we have a single site that contains a single image. For every client, we should check what is the size of the screen and also on what connection they are on and then we should send them this image in an appropriate size. We also need to calculate what is the best quality/size ratio. There are also tons of other things we need to do. Doug walked us through all the gotchas and explained why and how to solve them. I would say that for the majority of the users/developers we should just use cloudinary.com and let it do the job for us (as suggested by Doug and some other person in the crowd).
The funniest and most entertainment talk was by Miroslav Šedivý. Apparently, a day has 24h +/- 1 hour. There are almost 600 time zones! Before the 1st WW, there were more than 20 timezones just in Europe. I can’t imagine the confusion back then. That said we still have places where the confusion persists. For example, North Korea and Turkey often change timezone because of some event they have. Turkey change into summer time zone (GMT+3) on March 28, 2011, at 3:00 a.m. instead of March 27. This was because of the nationwide exam on 27th. In 2014 they did something similar because of the election and then we have several reports where officials respect the time change but cell phones and airlines do not. So yeah a lot of confusion regarding this.
The last talk I want to mention was regarding Python environment – “Pipenv: Python-Dev Workflow for Humans” held by Nejc Zupan. Pipenv is now the official recommended Python packaging tool. Nejc talked about how to use it and why. Even thou I know pipenv from before I learned a few things. Definitely, I think Pythonistas should start using pipenv asap.
In the following weeks, all the presentational slides should be uploaded to pyconweb.com so make sure to check them out.
