Friday - the first day of the PyCon conference
As you might've seen on our Instagram, our group arrived at the conference on Friday - we skipped the first day thinking that the "hard stuff" was going to start then. Unfortunately, we quickly regretted our decision. Thursday already contained few presentations we could find interesting, such as “Python REST frameworks review” and the one about monoliths and microservices. Since the beginning of the conference, our team split into few groups, which is easily understandable - some people were interested in data science, some in microcontrollers, others in web development.
With that approach, everyone was satisfied with what they learned. There were lectures about PySpark and Pandas, Smart houses, security in Python web apps, and Pyramid web framework. Few of us also took part in talks about how some of tools and services (i.e. DNS/TLS) work on servers. It's fair to say that this knowledge surely will be helpful in our job! As you can see, Python is used in many ways and many different areas.
Saturday - it's all about web development workshops
The second day was about one thing, WORKSHOPS. There was something for everyone - our Data Science squad went to TensorFlow and Pandas lectures and workshops, while others were more interested in pytest (unit testing tool) and micropython (python for IoT). I attended workshops about Red Hat OpenShift - a container orchestration tool built on top of Kubernetes. It was conducted by Maciej Szulik from Red Hat, who introduced attendees to OpenShift and showed everyone how to use it. We deployed Python microservices to cluster, learned how to do rolling updates, build images, and conduct health checks of our services in OpenShift.
The whole Merixstudio team was satisfied with all of the workshops they attended and consider them to be the strongest asset of the whole conference. But that obviously didn't make us ditch on presentations - after dinner, we went to watch lectures about static typing in Python and Uber transition from monolith to microservices.
Sunday - last few hours to learn about Python
The last day of the conference was Sunday, but we still squeezed in some time to see the presentation about design patterns in Python. It was a good decision since we were able to learn about few interesting patterns, such as Fascade Pattern, which we will probably start to use in our projects. After that it was time to leave - we needed to go back to Poznań to get some rest before going back to work on the next day!:)
Conference is not only about learning web development
I described what we've learned, but conferences are not only about knowledge! During the whole event, we had few breaks from absorbing knowledge, which was surely needed - you gotta let your brain have a little rest! Every day there was a buffet and let me tell you - we ate a lot of great food during this weekend, kudos to the organizers!There was also a barbecue on Friday evening, while on other nights attendees could play board games with other developers. As you can see, we've had plenty of time to network and meet new people from the Python world!
Was it worth it?
Overall, the conference was very intensive for us, and we simply couldn't get bored while attending so many interesting presentations and workshops. We met a lot of new like-minded people, as well as learned about new tools and new perspectives. As I said, the best thing about PyCon were its workshops. However, there were some things that we hope will get better next year.
Some lectures that we have anticipated turned out to be for beginners, therefore instead of broadening our knowledge, we were told about stuff we already know quite well. But as you can see it's not the biggest of complaints and it can be simply fixed with showing the advancement level of each discussed topic. Overall I think that we will visit PyCon again and who knows, maybe some of us will have a chance to conduct their own presentations or workshops!