PyCon SE 2020 Track: Web Development & Education

Abstract: The Web Traversal Library is a powerful, high-level framework for scraping and interacting with the web, developed at Klarna for reinforcement learning applications, and now completely open source. Let's see how it works and what it can do! About the speaker: Marcus Näslund is a mathematician, educator, writer and software engineer at Klarna in Stockholm.

Abstract: Websockets and webhooks serve like a backbone of a modern real-time API system, providing a way to communicate in real-time changes or updates. During this talk I’ll introduce what websockets and webhooks are, why and for what they are useful, some of the security issues you need to be aware of and how to use Python to write a websocket client/server and a webhook producer/consumer. Especially for webhooks I’ll talk about the complexity of creating a reliable system that can scale to hundreds of webhooks, of the necessary retry policies you need to support and of the strategies you can put in place to alleviate slow or faulty consumers. About the speaker: Christian Barra is a Software Engineer, Tech Lead and international speaker living in Berlin. He’s the founder of AfterMachines, a company that provides a real-time platform for your applications. He also works as a consultant, providing training and consulting on backend applications and cloud infrastructure. He is an active member of the tech community in Berlin, conference organiser and a Python Software Foundation Fellow. You can follow him on twitter @christianbarra

Abstract: One of the common actions we perform, when we visit a website is search. Whether it’s an e-commerce website or video streaming platform, search always plays a major role. It takes thousands of hours of engineering efforts to get this done. Elasticsearch is one of the famous service built over the Apache Lucene (Open Source Search Engine written in Java) and powers up the search in numerous applications. It’s a real-time based distributed search system. Python is an excellent language to write a production-ready search engine using Elasticsearch in very less time. In this talk, I will be talking about how production-ready search engines are developed in less time. I will be covering use-cases of Python and Elasticsearch working together for indexing, retrieval of documents and documents scoring (or boosting). I will also discuss the common problems faced by engineers to keep the data sync between the SQL database and Elasticsearch. About the speaker: Harshit Prasad is a Software Engineer at Grofers - India’s largest online grocery shopping platform. He is an avid programmer who is passionate about code, design and technology. Harshit is an open-source contributor and worked with many organisations such as HackerRank, CERN in the past. He has been a Google Summer of Code student two times in 2017 and 2018. When Harshit is away from work - he likes to play badminton, write blogs, help people on StackOverflow. He loves travelling and photography.

Abstract: This talk is about the common Anti-Patterns in Python. Among overwhelming resources to teach best practices in Python, it is more scary that there are very few places which will teach you worse practices. There are plenty of ways to write bad code. But in Python, one in particular reigns as king. About the speaker: Pratibha Jagnere is a Sr Python developer of her company looking over the development and maintenance of backend including APIs and internal python packages. Via this talk, she wants to share how they improved their code by removing anti-patterns.

Abstract: Single-Sign-On (SSO) allows users to authenticate with a single ID and password to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. In this talk, we'll discuss how an SSO works and how it can be designed. We'll also see the code to implement it in Python using Django (REST Framework). About the speaker: Vibhu Agarwal is an avid Pythonista, open-source enthusiast and a Back-End Developer at Viga Entertainment Technology, developing applications serving different UIs (Web, Desktop, AR/VR) and designing CI/CD pipelines for their delivery.

Abstract: Semantic technologies are extremely versatile and can be applied to many endeavours; for example, knowledge management, worldbuilding and storytelling. I will demonstrate the use of semantic technologies in all of the above-mentioned fields using Contextualise, a Flask-based knowledge management application. About the speaker: Brett Alistair Kromkamp is a Python and JavaScript developer. 3D/AR and linked data technologist. Creator of Contextualise.

Abstract: Math is often seen as one of the most difficult subjects to students during their school years. In this presentation, we want to break that notion, by showing how Python can turn learning math into a visual and exciting experience to everyone envolved! About the speaker: Jerônimo is an IT technician that works in UFPel (a federal university in Brazil), loves to tinker with gadgets and open source code, usually talks about technology and philosophy in his spare time and believes that education is the best tool to create a better world.

Abstract: The talk is about pitfalls in django development, we will go through the query optimisation, cacheing (or when to not cache) and how to do it properly, what and how to measure (applies to all python code). About the speaker: Magnus Knutas has been developing for 20 years as a consultant for both big and small companies, has done code for homeassistant and maintain some libs that are reversed-enginered from "open" api:s.

Abstract: What makes Django so powerful? In this talk we will look at how Django utilizes Python's most characteristic features to power up its own features and expressiveness, starting from concrete examples gathered from Django's own source code. About the speaker: Agustín Scaramuzza is a software developer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. His primary interests are Python and everything Linux. He discovered Python in 2013, started working with it in 2015 and never looked back. He enjoys giving talks and participating as a mentor or coach in workshops or courses for small and manageable groups of people, in order to be able to give a more personalized approach to students and allow them to progress faster.

Abstract: How do you know that you can bbq in Stockholm? In my technical "go-over-the-river" solution, I have set up a virtual machine that calls the answering machine of Stockholm's fire department every night, records the call, transcribes the text, analyzes it and makes a decision whether it is a fire ban or not. All this is saved in a database which can then be accessed from the https://kanjaggrilla.nu website. About the speaker: Mazda Imani is a mechatronics engineer that loves exploring embedded solutions. His native programming language is C and he embraces Python for his free time projects. Making things work is his prio No.1.

Abstract: Agile practises such as short iterations and reprioritizing continuously empower developers to deliver high quality software, but what about the needs of the stakeholders? They need to know when their problem is going to be solved. Does agile stand in the way of having a transparent and predictable workflow? About the speaker: Sara Wänerskär is a Python developer who loves data and agile practises.

Abstract: Through the lens of the work we’re doing at imagiLabs, I will present an approach of teaching coding to children and teenagers in a way that engages girls in particular. I will explain how computer science and Python basics that are normally taught as part of introductory computer science classes can be combined with creativity, self-expression, and a community in order to create a welcoming environment and an intriguing coding experience. I will show how we follow the constructionist and constructivist theories in education, in which discovery learning, “building” knowledge, personal exploration, and relevant learning are instrumental. I will discuss how at imagiLabs we have developed a curriculum around these principles and the findings of our own user-centered research. Finally, I will show some of our Creative coding in Python activities in action. Come ready to get creative, get inspired, and learn how you can express yourself through code! About the speaker: Beatrice is the co-founder and CTO of imagiLabs (https://imagilabs.com/). She’s an engineer and an educator and believes that technology education is the key to create a better world. A diversity advocate, she strives to inspire and empower girls through imagiLabs.

Abstract: In the last few weeks, one of the largest and most exciting experiments in the history of mankind has taken place, with over 900 million children in over 190 countries being the recipients of online (virtual) education. And in one corner of the globe in a high school in the UK, Python Programming lessons in an entirely online medium were delivered for the 1st time as opposed to the then normal face-to-face mode of delivery. We will see in this poster how the teaching of Python Programming in this online fashion was both delivered and received, for a group of children aged 11-14. We will discuss how great efforts were made to ensure that the online sessions were fit-for-purpose, educational and at the same time exciting and fun. We will discuss how we discovered the pleasant surprises and advantages of teaching on an online forum. We will look at some of the Python Programs, such as currency converters, modelling graphs using libraries, random password generaters, etc. produced by the children. To conclude, it was a surprisingly pleasant experience for all concerned (i.e educators, students, parents, etc.) and we believe going forward the education system should also seriously incorporate this medium of online learning, not just for adults but also for children. About the speaker: Lilian studied Computer Science at high school and did her PhD in Computer Modelling from University College London. She went on to looking at computer applications and programming in the pharmaceutical sector before entering formal teaching for the next generation. She is currently engaged in teaching Python programming, C# and Javascript. She has given lectures in conferences both in the UK and abroad about the teaching of Computer Programming to young people. She has ran computer clubs including that of 'computer-assisted' investment for children and is a full member of the British Computer Society. Lilian firmly believes that in this emergent brave new world, the Anthrpocene age, the computer (with its associated technologies) is the harbinger to transform globally man's short slavish existence to a better one - a world community defined by longer, richer and freer life experiences. She believes it is imperative that our schools empower our young children with his new knowledge, a nd Lilian herself did help reshape the Computer Science Department of an independent boys' school as Head of Department. She has produced for children more than 75 YouTube (online) videos on Computer Science and Programming - and has had more than 12,000 hits globally.

Abstract: A few years ago, I started dabbling with Python to dip my toes into programming. Today I work as a software engineer at Spotify, using Python in my day-to-day job. I will talk about how I got here and how Python has been with me during my career journey. About the speaker: Jessica Shortz is from the US and now works as a software engineer in Stockholm at Spotify. Prior to starting her career in code, she worked as an attorney, tutor, and writer. She is passionate about building inclusive tech communities.

Abstract: Henrik will talk about his experience helping Swedish grade 8 students learn to program in Pyhton. The talk will cover the philosophy used and how the course was organized. It will also give tips for teachers, and details on what the students found easy and hard. About the speaker: Henrik Warne has been programming professionally for 25 years, and he still loves to code. He has worked on small embedded systems and large distributed systems, using a wide variety of technologies and programming languages. He is interested in all aspects of software engineering, from architecture, design and methodology to implementation, testing and debugging. He is currently a software engineer at TriOptima, developing systems for financial risk management.