In September 2017 Ebury went to PyCon Spain 2017 which took place in Cáceres (Extremadura), at the beautiful location of San Francisco’s Cultural Complex.

Read on for insights on refactoring, unicode, serverless, testing factories, diversity in the work place and open source!

In this article we would like to give pull out some key talks at the conference and the different roles that we had there:

  1. As sponsors: We love Python so we are PyConEs sponsors as part of our commitment. Its great to meet others passionate about getting the best out of python and of course, because we are hiring.
  2. As participants: We want to learn, listen to interesting speakers and share ideas and experiences (we are not a Developersaurus Rex Company).

PyConES 2017 and what we have learnt about…

Development

High-impact refactors while keeping the lights on

Diego shows how they are handling a big refactor in ticketea using an A/B strategy, different from our refactor but similar to our main goal.

Unicode

With Python 3, strings will be unicode by default. We are all happy with that, although, do we know what unicode is? Do you know that emojis are unicode and even the different colours in emojis are part of the unicode?

Some resources:

Serverless

Serverless is so hyped nowadays and AWS lambda is the main star. Creating Python serverless with AWS is as simple as:

 def my_handler(event, context):
    message = 'Hello'
    return { 'message': message }

Also, there are some Python frameworks which make it easier, in particular:

  • Chalice: Microframework Flask-like.
  • Zappa: Tool to deploy your Python WSGI apps to AWS.

Testing

Factories, what the hell?

This talk showed an approach to solve the ’empty database problem’ for new developers or whilst executing tests using Factory Boy to generate model objects programmaticaly.

  • Pro: High customisation level.
  • Con: Extra effort to develop a ‘model generator’.

“Pytest: recomendaciones, paquetes básicos para testing en Python y Django” (Pytest: recommendations and basics for Python/Django testing)

Here lots of useful solutions for py.test are discussed, such as using the coverage files to feed a monitor daemon in order to run automatically only the tests that affect a modified piece of code. Lots of work still to be done here!

Miscellaneous

Gender gap

Diversity is important for improving what we do. Diversity is invaluable in regards to problem solving.

Women represent half of the population, however, the technological industry claims that only around 30% of their workforce are women, and that percentage decreases down to circa 20% when focusing on tech teams. If we analyse open source communities, those hardly reach 10% of women as is the case of the OpenStack Foundation or the Linux Kernel. The Python community has some initiatives such as young women community, to try tackling this issue.

Open source

Have you ever thought about how the open source is managed? Are people managing the software actually being paid for it? And if not,  has anyone time to do it? Find the answers to these questions by following the story of Werner Koch

Lastly, did you know that pypi and pip are maintained by one guy working part time at Amazon? Is that the model we want? Have a look below and have your own opinions.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article and hope to see you on our blog soon!

Join the team changing the future of FinTech

Apply now!