Last May, I was lucky to attend PyData Amsterdam 2019, and even had the opportunity to present a tutorial on Friday.
It was my first time in Amsterdam, the city is really beautiful and the organization of the conference was top-notch. The quality of the talks and tutorials was very high too, and it all contributed to three awesome days.
If you couldn’t be there, below are some of my favorite talks from the conference.
First of all, be sure to take a few minutes to watch The profession of solving the (wrong) problem, by Vincent Warmerdam. Even if you’re not a data scientist or working with data, I definitely think you should watch this talk, since it concerns every one trying to solve things. We all too often loose sight of the end goal as we are so eager to try and solve the problem, if possible with our newest shiny toys. This talk is a great reminder to take a step back and a moment to think.
Another must-watch talk, Why our products and communities need our empathy, by Sasha Romijn. You might think that the topic is not original enough, but believe me, we need more talks like this one. With great analogies and smart examples, probably one of the best talks I’ve seen on the topic so far.
I was very excited about the talk by Wilder Rodrigues, Improving Machine Learning Workflow. I am delighted that the topic of productionizing ML is (finally) gaining traction in the community. It is always great to hear about how others have solved similar problems in their own way, and I do hope that we will work as a community together towards standardized solutions similar to the ones that have emerged in Software Engineering.
Last but not least, a talk about very smart ways to store large sets with a very low memory footprint. If you like to understand how things work behind the hood and love to learn about funny mathematical properties can save the day, have a look at this talk by Ondrej Kokes.