PyDays 2017

PyDays 2017 was Austria's first conference dedicated to the Python programming language. It took place on May 5 and May 6 and was graciously hosted by the Linuxwochen Wien at FH Technikum in Vienna. It was great on many levels: meeting new people excited about Python and where it's headed, over 20 talks, interesting hallway conversations, etc.

I helped out with the organization of the conference, mostly taking care of catering. We (the organization team) are very happy with how everything went. The atmosphere was welcoming and open, the quality of the talks and workshops was very good, attendance was great, and people seemed to have a really good time. From an organizational perspective, the talks mostly stayed on-time, the audio/video hardware worked fine, and the PyDays booth was well-received. Giving out snacks, coffee, soda, cake during breaks worked out nicely and was received very well. The feedback, both at and after the conference, was very positive.

In addition to the co-organization of the Conference, I also held a talk about Dask, a Python library for parallel computing. It provides data structures similar to NumPy Arrays or Python Dataframes that process operations in parallel and scale to out-of-memory datasets. Dask is exciting since it provides the analytical power and familiar mental model of Dataframes, but handles hundreds of gigabytes of data and allows seamless scaling from a single laptop to a computing cluster. The talk was well-received, and there was a lot of interest at the end and in the hallway afterwards. The slides are online, if you're interested as well.

Finally, I'd like to thank my co-organizers, Claus, Kay, Helmut and Sebastian, as well as the people who helped out during the conference, for all their great work to make the PyDays a success. I'd also like to thank our sponsors: the Python Software Foundation, the Python Software Verband e.V., T-Mobile, UBIMET, and Jetbrains.

Overall it was great to see so much community interest in Python. If you're passionate about Python as well, join us on the Python Austria Slack and our meetups!