PyCon UK 2016

Like the last few years (2013, 2014 and 2015) I’ve been to the PyCon UK 2016. This year, 2016, it was in Cardiff instead of Coventry. Next year, 2017, it will be in Cardiff again.

It was in the City Hall in Cardiff. An excellent location! much bigger (well, some room could have been bigger). The talks were a mixture and I tried to go to more workshops: even if I enjoy a talk quite often I learn more from a workshop. And I tried to be a good workshop student and I had all the required Python packages.

I’m writing it 3 weeks after the event but to mention two workshops:

• One was about Scikit. This is a way to make Python “”understand”” (double quotes are on purpose) English or languages. I really liked that I understood the limitations of the system: I want to use something similar and now I know what can be done and which “correctness” I can expect.
• Another workshop had lot of Pandas for data analysis. I do have a better idea of how Pandas can be used and it was in my list of things to study – thanks PyCon UK now I have a better idea about how to use it.

There were many interesting talks like (and not only these ones!):

• A data processing toolbox for agile scientific research: how a software engineer is trying to help researchers to have a better “pipeline”: with git repos, unit tests, acceptance tests, trying to validate the results… doing what science is doing but with their software
• How to Automate your Data Cleanup with Python: the speaker gave many links and resources for this task. By the way, no easy way for the PDFs (sometimes is nice to know that I haven’t missed anything)
• Test-Driven Data Analysis: instead of Test-Driven Development is Test-Driven Data Analysis: same principles, different constraints. Some of the explained tools could be useful for chronojump-importer that I’ve been working on.
• And many other good talks!

As usually, an important part is to meet people: some new people, people which I’m doing some project with, old friends… and many people from the London Python Code Dojo, etc.

See you there in 2017 again!