This evening I had the pleasure to steal 30 of Mike Müller's precious minutes as he and his team put the finishing touches on preparations for EuroPython 2014. With 1200 attendees, a 35% jump since last year, Python continues to become ever more popular across Europe, and consequently organising the event demands an increasing amount of time from the extremely dedicated volunteer organisers.
When speaking with Mike his passion for Python keeps coming through, and since he discovered Python 1.5 in 1999 he hasn't looked back.
Coming from a scientific background and using Python in his day job as a hydrologist to model with NumPy, PyTables, and throwing in some Fortran too, he has extensive knowledge of using Python for big problem analysis. Problems that will continue to grow as the global water situation changes annually. Mike's use of Python to study these changes, and his findings, may prove invaluable to everyone in a few years.
Luckily for others, Mike likes to share his knowledge and has clocked up over 180 courses and 420 days teaching Python since 2004, mostly through his own operation, Python Academy. While he spends most of his time teaching introductory and scientific Python courses, he enjoys advanced Python, optimisation, and functional programming
In addition to this he was instrumental in starting the EuroSciPy conference series and chairing two PyCon DE conferences before passing the baton to some of his colleagues as he turned his attention towards EuroPython.
EuroPython - How It All Comes Together
EuroPython 2014 is run completely by volunteers and splits the work into 10 teams, each one with their own specific responsibilities. As Chair Mike is involved with all of these teams and speaks very highly of each one, saying he simply trusts them to do their job and leaves them to it. All team leads have been meeting once per week over the last month in an hangout to coordinate the organisation. This is also where important decision are made in consensus.
This years increase in attendees is not the only aspect of EuroPython that is getting bigger and better. With an increase in fame comes an increase in sponsorship, and the organisers have used this to offer more talks, training sessions, video coverage of presentations, and they also made a conscious effort to keep the costs of the event down so that it is accessible to everyone throughout Europe to come and enjoy the week.
Hosting the conference in Berlin is also an advantage, because being smack bang in the middle of Europe and straddling East and West, it brings a very diverse mix of people and cultures together from across Europe and also draws attendees from Asia, America, and Africa.
Bringing together such a diverse group of talented Python coders, coupled with thought provoking presentations, training events, and weekend sprint sessions should see it generate many new ideas, some of which will hopefully sprout into new projects over the coming years.
The Future of EuroPython
When asked about the future of EuroPython Mike was obviously very positive. The organisation has a lot of momentum and Python offers so much functionality to users that managing that growth will be something to discuss during meetings at the conference and continuing once the conference is over when everyone involved can take a step back and assess the overall picture.
Mike believes that one of the main goals should be to keep it as inclusive as possible. As EuroPython expands he does not want it to become so big that some of the smaller European nations could not host it, when using only their own resources. Mike suggests that the burden of organising the EuroPython conferences is shared by more than just one country. This means utilising international teams. The EuroPython 2014 programme team is a good example of this, consisting of members form Poland, France, Germany, and the UK.
This is based on Mike's belief that ensuring there is a rich diversity within the community is one of the main considerations going forward. As events get bigger, so do their venues, costs, and ticket prices, and that is something the organisation will aim to manage in the best way possible.
Tips and Tricks
Asking Mike about his own development environment he had 2 basic tips that could apply to everyone.
- Choose the right tools for you. Mike likes to use IPython Notebook to explore new algorithms. He alternates between Sublime Text and the Wingware Python IDE depending on the project size, to do his development work.
- Turn off email. He even goes as far as having a separate laptop for development where he codes and only allows himself to check stackoverflow when he is trying to get in the zone.
The Future of Python - What interests Mike at the moment
Obviously Python 3 will be the main theme over the coming years. Everybody both loves change and hates supporting and patching legacy code, but with 5 years of stable releases the mass adoption cycle should kick into gear soon.
An interesting project that is on Mike's radar is the PyPy-STM (Software Transactional Memory) which is a variant of the regular PyPy interpreter that can run in parallel multiple independent CPU threads in the same process.
The third is Python to GPU transcoding. When it was suggested to him that it sounds like it may be driven by the cryptocurrency GPU mining interest, he assured me his interest was purely scientific.
RhodeCode and EuroPython
Here at RhodeCode we are really excited about EuroPython 2014 and you will see many of our developers at the various talks.
We are extremely proud to be the platinum sponsor of this event because we hope that other projects spring forth from the Python community and enjoy the same kind of success and adventures we experience daily as we expand.
From all at RhodeCode - Enjoy your week at EuroPython and we look forward to seeing you there.
Brian Butler