Hurray, this friday there’s PyGrunn again¶

Tags: python, pygrunn, django

Hurray, this friday (23 May) there’s the 11th installment of the Dutch PyGrunn conference. Time to wake up again at an early hour to grab the train to the north of the Netherlands :-) Oh, and to dig out a historic legendary pygrunn t-shirt (I’ve chosen the 2012 one).

I really enjoy these conferences. There is a nice mix of talks to choose from, from python inner details to how-we-use-it. Here are four that I’m looking forward to:

• Combining fastAPI and Django. At our company we’re using fastAPI for a new project, but all our existing projects are in Django. I hope to get a better feel for the (im)possibilities. Personally I haven’t used fastAPI, so a conference like pygrunn helps a to broaden my knowledge. Sebastián Ramírez, the creator of fastAPI, gives the closing talk so that’ll be a good source of information.

• And… Sebastián’s talk might also be a good source of a “mental model”, a way of thinking about software and software design and projects. He’ll talk about how to make code that is less error-prone, simpler, more efficient, and have a great developer experience, all at the same time. And all this while including best practices by default. I have the feeling that I could “up my game” quite a bit. I’m not using type hints everywhere. I really need to understand async/await, especially how to use that in an understandable way. Anyway, that’s what such a conference is for, too: to influence us and to change the way we think.

• Jan Murre’s “your API on the fly” talk about how to generate APIs for Amsterdam’s many sets of open data. APIs filled through Airflow. We’re experimenting with Airflow, so some info from practical experience will come in handy. And APIs generated from custom schemas sounds interesting on its own.

• Frontend for backenders. Yeah. I’m one of those dinosaurs: the last time I touched javascript is probably 8 years ago. A bit of templating and a bit of css is all I normally use for a frontend. Most of our frontends are nice React single page apps talking to a backenders-created REST API. So personally I’m very interested in what’s possible for backenders :-)

I always make summaries of the talks I attend, I’ll update the text above with links to the talks once the conference is over.

Oh, I’ve used “we” and “our” above. That’s Nelen & Schuurmans, a water/climate/data/python company in Utrecht (NL). “Data driven water management” is the tagline, which fits quite well. There’s a vacancy right now, which I’m sneaking into this generic blog post :-) Our office is 5 minutes walk from Utrecht central station, right in the nice old center of Utrecht… There’s lots to choose from: open source Qgis plugins, React, Django, fastAPI, Ansible, hard-core Fortran (!) hydrology, kubernetes, postgis. And you’re helping keep the Netherlands (and parts of Australia, Germany, Vietnam, etc) dry where it should be dry and wet where it should be wet.

You can talk to me at the conference for more info. There’s a 2 minute video of me explaining the company, I should still be recognizable even though I’ve lost some 12kg since making that video :-)