PyCon Italia / PyData Italy 2016 Write-Up

Last week I’ve travelled to Florence to attend PyCon Sette, the seventh edition of the Italian Python Conference, born 10 years ago and held annually (with three editions of EuroPython in between).

First off, I have something to admit: as this was my first time at PyCon Italia, clearly I didn’n know what I was missing. Being overly busy with work and side projects, this is the perfect excuse to resume the blog.

Florence

The city doesn’t need much presentation: it’s simply one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I haven’t been there for a few years but things don’t seem to be very different from a turist’s point of view. The craft beer scene is booming, but at the same time culinary traditions are well preserved. Both of these are big thumbs-up for me. The best random moment of my trip: getting lost in the back streets of the old city centre, and then finding a dodgy hole-in-the-wall place that sells incredible focaccia and panini.

The Conference

PyCon Sette can be summarised as three intense days of Python, with more than 500 attendees. The first day was opened by Alex Martelli with a keynote about exception handling in Python 2 vs Python 3. A part from the keynotes, at any given time we had between 4 and 6 parallel sessions of talks or trainings. I decided to stick to the PyData track for the whole time, although the other tracks were also featuring some interesting talks. Some of the tracks were related to a particular sub-community, with PyData and DjangoVillage having a strong presence, but also Odoo, DjangoGirls and the Italian Postgres User Group are worth mentioning.

I’ve listened to many interesting talks. On top of my head, a few to remember: the talk about Internet of Things by Stefano Terna of TomorrowData.io (also winners of the start-up contest), the one about deployment of scikit-learn models in the cloud by Alex Casalboni and an interesting one about Functional Programming and Dask by Holger Peters.

Overall, hats off to the organisers. In particular, I had some conversations with Valerio Maggio who is the founder of PyData Italy. We exchanged some opinions about the conference and the community in the broader sense. Hopefully the interest around Data Science in Italy will keep rising, so maybe several local events throughout the year will be held, rather than having just one big national event per year.

My Talk

On Saturday, I gave a talk on Building Data Pipelines in Python. I wrote about building data pipelines with Luigi before, but this talk gave me the opportunity to look at the bigger picture. The general message was that Research and Engineering are different disciplines, but we (data-sciency and researchy people) can benefit from trying to meet in the middle. In particular, good engineering practices can help the less engineering-oriented researchers in their day-to-day mundane tasks. After opening the discussion on the overall topic, I had a brief moment of ranting about unit testing (or the lack of testing culture in some academic circles), I introduced Luigi as a workflow manager to build pipelines in Python and I closed with an overview on logging (described by Alex Martelli in his keynote as something that scares people off, at least initially) and a consideration about using good engineering practices in research.

The talk was addressed to beginners and to the less engineering-savvy PyData users, so expert software engineers probably didn’t benefit much from it. I had anyway a good response with several people coming after the talk for a chat. All in all, if at least one researcher will look into testing or will decide to try one of the workflow managers I mentioned, I’d say I’ve reached my goal.

The slides of my talk are on my speakerdeck (videos will be on-line soon).

See you next year in Florence!