Last weekend an amazing edition of Python San Sebastián took place. Here are the main highlights of what the conference looked like to me.

Friday starting with a workshop on the morning that took place in the university of informatics of Basque Country. It was a workshop about machine learning, with Python.

The content was great, and enlightening. It’s a very interesting topic, and presented with the main tools to work in Python: Jupyter, numpy, pandas, etc. Promising start.

Saturday was the first day for talks, and it started with a nice keynote about the Python community, followed by a nice presentation about web scraping with Python tools, that also covered some tricks to do with PostgreSQL, such as efficiently computing the distance between strings with a special operator available through an extension.

After that, I presented my talk titled Demystifying coroutines and asynchronous programming in Python, on which I covered the basics behind modern asynchronous programming.

It followed a presentation with an introduction about Django REST framework, with a good explanation of not just the technical stack but also web concepts, and the ideas behind REST. After the presentation it was time for lunch.

After lunch we enjoyed a talk about the challenges from the Plone community on evolving their Python code base. I always learn and get inspired when I listen to a Plone talk. It followed a keynote on deep learning, and after that it was time for lightning talks.

From all the good lightning talks, there was one that kind of reminded me of the “WATs” of Pythons, showing code snippets that were seemingly wrong (or plain wrong in some cases(, but valid with small tweaks).

See what I mean:

In [1]: 1.  # float
Out[1]: 1.0

In [2]: 1..__class__
Out[2]: float

In [3]: 1.__class__  # error trying to get the class of the object 1
   1.__class__  # error trying to get the class of the object 1
            ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

In [4]: 1   .__class__  # it works with a space though
Out[4]: int

In [5]: -0  # negative zero?
Out[5]: 0

In [6]: -0.0  # negative zero!
Out[6]: -0.0

In [7]: ...  # Ellipsis
Out[7]: Ellipsis

In [8]: .... # 4 dots? nothing
   .... # 4 dots? nothing
                        ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

In [9]: ....__eq__(...)  # ... or as an operator to call methods from Ellipsis
Out[9]: True


In [10]: N = 1000000000

In [11]: f"{N:_}"  # formatting numbers à la Python 3.6
Out[11]: '1_000_000_000'

In [12]: f"{N:,}"  # oldie but goodie
Out[12]: '1,000,000,000'

Sunday started with another great keynote about processing music with Python. After the coffee break, there was a talk by Stephane Wirtel telling us what’s new in Python 3.7, followed by a talk about the hug framework and how to build REST APIs with it, and then the last talk of the morning was about optimization algorithms (in the sort of dynamic programming, etc.), to solve real-world problems for a real platform. It’s one of my favourite topics, so I enjoyed that talk a lot.

After lunch, the last talks were about building a bot for Telegram, and a keynote about machine learning, and the tools that Python provides for it (scikit learn, and similar to those covered at the workshop the first day).

Then the lightning talks, and the closure of the conference, which was amazing and I enjoyed very much.

All in all: a great conference on which I’ve met awesome professionals, I learnt new things and got a refresher on topics I was already familiar with, and got inspired to keep learning. Looking forward to the next edition already! Kudos to the organizers :-).