Back in July I attended my first Software Engineering conference EuroPython 2023. If you’re holding off of booking your first conference for various reasons or are unsure of which one to attend I found EuroPython a very friendly and welcoming conference, that is tailored to the developer. I found the conference fairly priced for the value that I got out of it. Unfortunately I can’t comment on the tutorials or the sprints as I did not attend them.

Would I go to another conference after that experience: Yes - I went to FOSDEM 24

Would I go to EuroPython again: Yes, I will give it a couple of years before going again as I’ve now got a taste for attending Software Engineering conferences so I would like to check others out first but no doubt I will return in the future.

The key purpose to this blog post is to reflect on a selection of talks that I found valuable or enjoyed during the conference. There was a wide selection of talks to attend although sadly I could not attend them all. Most of the talks I attended were aimed towards a DevOps audience.

CLI application development made easier with typer — Vinícius Gubiani Ferreira

This talk introduced me to the Typer library. As someone who has built CLI’s in the past using such libraries as Argparse and Fire, I quickly discovered that Typer is a game changer. You can get a CLI app running in no time at all using this. I created a proof of concept CLI thanks to this talk. If I was to make a CLI application in the future this would be my go to library.

Optimizing Your CI Pipelines — Sebastian Witowski

This talk could not have come at a more appropriate time for me, as when I returned to work I was going to have to spend a lot of time creating pipelines. Some solid advice and recommendations around pipeline creation that I was able to utilise immediately.

pip install malware — Max Kahan

Nothing in this talk was a great shock to me. Plenty of bad actors are deploying malicious packages on PyPI. That being said it was a very well presented talk and is a great reminder to not just blindly install anything off the internet. The key takeway could extend beyond the Python ecosystem.

Designing a Human-Friendly CLI for API-Driven Infrastructure — Oliver Rew

A great talk discussing closely coupled API’s and autogenerated CLI’s based off the API documentation. I can think of plenty of times in the past where I would have benefitted from such tooling. The only downside is that this tool is not publicly available, however the insight into well designed tooling was valuable.

From idea to production — Honza Král

A self declared opinionated checklist for going from an idea into production. The example given was for a Django website but I would say it could be applied to most development projects. Key point to note is setting ideas up with the necessary tooling to succeed from the beginning will save a lot of pain retrofitting it once you’ve gone to production.

Honerable meantion for lighting talk F**k it - How to Fix Production Code in 5 Minutes — Sebastien Crocquevieille

Watch on Youtube

Bit of light humour to finish off the conference. Content Advisory as you can probably work out there is some bad language in this lightning talk.