Pyntxos and Sunshine: Our week at EuroPython

Last week we shipped off to Spain for a week at EuroPython. Even before we had started to properly travel, we started spotting other Python developers.

Some of us even ended up on a plane full of conference-bound passengers:

Spotting 🎸🐍 folks at the airport already. Looks like it’ll be a 🐍 ✈️ at 18:25!

— Paul (@phalt_) July 19, 2015

We arrived over the weekend and the weather was there to welcome us. Despite being based in London, most of the team at Lyst are not British. For the few of us who were, the weather was quite a shock! We whipped out our summer time clothes (for the first time that year) and fully embraced the weather.

The actual event kicked off in the Euskalduna Conference Center right by the river. The place was gigantic and the conference rooms spacious enough to avoid overcrowding. We ended up seeing many talks (there were 183 speakers).

Some of our favourites included the Keynote from Ola and Ola, which left pretty much everyone in the room speechless. The storytelling and art was like no other technical conference talk.

Yay! ✨🎉 You can already see our @europython keynote online! Starts at 47m 16s: https://t.co/kkYOk6umHB #europython #ep15

— Ola Sitarska (@olasitarska) July 21, 2015

A few members of the Lyst team even managed to speak! We’ve been eager to share all the cool things we’ve been building and we got to chat with some great engineers about it all after we gave our respective talks.

Paul spoke about his experiences writing RESTful APIs in Django on our large scale service:

Romain gave a great talk about his progress getting things like pandas working nicely with PyPy:

And Maciej gave a great talk about the work he’s done on Approximate Nearest Neighbours in Python to recommend the best products based on other similar products:

You can also read more about Approximate Nearest Neighbours on our blog.

Beyond the conference, we managed to sample the delights of Spain, although we did struggle to decipher the lovely language. Here’s a short of us using cutting edge technology to figure out what to eat:

We all had a fantastic time and it was great to meet so many cool people building cool things. We’ll definitely be back next year for some more Pyntxos and Python madness!

If you caught up with us in Bilbao and you want to know more about what life is like at Lyst, check out our developer blog or our careers pages.

From all the Lyst team, Laster arte!