Python, the programming language many of the TrustYou products are based on, increases in popularity and has a growing number of users from multiple disciplines. Among them: software engineers, computer linguists, data scientists, and physicists. They all use Python to e.g. crawl data from the world wide web, to perform sentiment analysis, or to run Earth-observation programmes.
Across the globe, Python enthusiasts gather thus at weekend-long tech conferences to exchange new ideas on their favorite coding language. At TrustYou we regularly sponsor PyCon events to engage with the international developer community.
From October 04-07, 2018, the engineering and computer science faculty of the University of Málaga became home to the 6th edition of PyConES. With quite a diverse agenda the 600 attendants could choose among 6 workshops and 56 talks, organized along the tracks Machine Learning, Web Technologies, and DevOps & Tools.
At tech conferences, TrustYou engineers set out to learn more about new trends and technologies. Or they discuss challenges they face in their everyday work with. People operations & culture managers engage with other companies, share best practices in recruiting tech talent or brainstorm on potential partnerships. And all of us had a great time in spreading the word on TrustYou as a supporter of the Python community!
So what did team members like most about PyConES this year?
Victor, VP Engineering:
“A lot of food for thought came from connecting with other tech companies like Eventbrite, Bloomberg, or Fever. We were exchanging knowledge about the challenges we’re all facing and got first-hand insights into how other companies work internally.
What is more, some talks were really on the cutting edge of technology: for instance, the one on how to apply attention neural networks to solve the automatic translation of text problems. This is currently under our radar and Ivan Bilan, one of our engineers of the MetaReview team is an expert in this research topic. He is trying to apply this technology to improve the performance of our NLP pipeline. It was great to see how the very same research topic attracts much interest all around the world and how different companies are applying it to solve different types of problems.”
Franziska, HR Manager & Python Newbie:
“In the course of my tech recruiting responsibilities, I started learning how to code in Python. Thus I enjoy attending the introductory workshops at PyCons because I always have the chance to learn something new. This time I went to the Introduction of Data Science in Python. I liked most that Jorge came with me and I could shadow him while performing different tasks. Even though the workshop was in Spanish, which I don’t speak, it was a nice refresher about matplotlib.”
Jorge, Team Lead MetaReview:
“I was quite impressed by the variety of talks and topics that were covered at PyConES this year. The keynote by Héctor Socas Navarro, a physicist from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) showed us some cutting-edge challenges that Astrophysics is facing and how technology is playing a key role here. It was amazing to learn more about the Universe and to see how Python can help! I especially liked the talk by Claudia Guiaro “Back to Basics: NLP”. She managed to explain the concepts by using a language the audience could understand. The talk is well-summarized in her github notes.”
Felicitas, Employer Branding Manager:
“At tech conferences, I usually spend my time networking with other companies or talking to Software Developers about the TrustYou engineering team and culture. This time I also attended two talks. Rafa Haro showed how Python can improve recommendations on streaming platforms like Netflix thanks to sentiment analysis of film reviews. And Data Scientist Sara Rodríguez López explained the differences between scraping and crawling. Both topics overlap with what we do at TrustYou and it was great to see these techniques in different contexts.”
Gonzalo, Team Lead:
“Since I’m pretty new in Python, PyConES 2018 has been great to start getting to know the awesome Python community in Spain. Good talks, ranging from NLP to astrophysics or the Python Garbage Collector. Also, they were designed for levels of all tastes, from introductory presentations to in-depth and more complex topics. Last but not least, I was in great company with Fanny, Feli, Victor and Jorge. They were always ready to explain to everybody what we do and why TrustYou is a great place to work.”
