A Rubyist at a Europython Conference. Day 5.

The EuroPython 2014 conference (@europython) took place late July at the BCC Berlin (Alexanderstraße 11). Friday was (big) data day and I summarized my favorite talks:

Table of Contents

• Friday July 25
  • Combining the powerful worlds of Python and R
  • Building Realtime Web Applications with WebRTC and Python
  • Lightning talks

Friday July 25

Combining the powerful worlds of Python and R

Ralph Heinkel (@ralhei) talked about the ‘powerful statistical open-source ecosystem called R, little known in the Python community’. Mostly used in scientific contexts it provides lots of functionality for doing statistical analysis, generation of various kinds of plots and graphs. R, Rserve, and pyRserve allows for R-functions to be called from Python as if they were implemented in Pytho. Even complete R scripts can be executed through this connection. Ralph’s demo’s looked pretty impressive, and he is coincidentally the creator and maintainer of pyRserve. Reading his blog is recommended.

Building Realtime Web Applications with WebRTC and Python

Tarashish Mishra (@tarashish) evangelized building peer to peer real time web applications with WebRTC. WebRTC enables web browsers with real-time communications (RTC) capabilities via simple JS api’s without the use of external plugins – with 3 main use cases: access and acquire video and audio streams, establishing connections between peers and streaming audio/video, or to communicate arbitrary data.

Tarashish discussed 3 API’s, getUserMedia which represents a stream of audio/video and can optain multiple tracks,
RTCPeerConnection for signal processing, Codec handling, peer-to-peer communication, security, bandwith management and more and RTCDataChannel. For his slides on the topic, plus an example app, head over to GitHub.

Lightning talks

Lightning talks! My favorite part of any conference! We heard about Sparts, a python library developed at Facebook that “aims to eliminate as much of the skeleton code as possible, making it as dead simple to write new services with little to no excess code.” Then a chat explaining library changes and (how to weapon against) them changing, featuring the incredibly cute ‘blinky'(0-0).

For conference announcements: Tryton Unconference Leipzig taking place November 14th and Django under the Hood – getting the Django core team together – taking place around the same time in Amsterdam.

Then there was a talk about the PaaS Cocaine and one on zipa’s ‘magic python REST clients’. Abraham Martin showed how HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) is less man-in-the-middle-attack prone than HTTPS.

And apparently the Python community in Argentina is thriving, with 1300+ members and fully booked conferences and PyCamps. ScipyConAr will take place in October for the second year. PyLadies and DjangoGirls workshops will be given.

Last but not least there was a chat by Erika on CodeWeekEU. We should all submit our coding workshops and dojo’s to be displayed to a bigger audience.