Transcript: EuroPython 2026 - Mia Bajić

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sixfeetup.com. Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat. I'm Will Vincent with Carlton

Gibson. Hey, Carlton. Hello, Will. And we're very pleased to have Mia from Europython join us today.

be there. You'll be there. Everyone should be there. Yes. Yes, exactly. Everyone should be

it's...

It's a week of all things Python. So we have two days of tutorials, three days of talks,

and we have two days of sprints. This year, sprints will be shared with EuroSciPy. And after

that, there will be EuroSciPy in Krakow, too. So in case you would like to spend two weeks in

the beautiful city of Krakow, you have an opportunity to be there.

Europython is a very big conference. I guess that most of our guests know DjangoCon,

which is a smaller conference. Europython has five to six tracks, depending on which year.

Apart from talks, we also have open spaces where if you have any idea, you can just write it

on a whiteboard or you can write it digitally and then you can just gather with people and

have some informal discussions. We also have summits. We have social events,

speakers' dinner, and all fun evening activities. We have piloted sessions, sessions for the

beginners, also for advanced users. So yeah, it's going to be a fun week.

just over 300 people there in person. How many people will be in Krakow?

We don't know how many people will be there, but we expect that there'll be around 1,500 probably.

Okay.

It's about five times as big.

manage your energy. What's your number one tip for getting through the week?

spending my night outside in the afternoons and in the evenings, so I usually skip morning talks.

I believe there'll be lots of people who like morning, so they go somewhere every morning to

listen to talks, open spaces, et cetera. I think it's very hard to, because there's so many events

and so many things happening. There are many talks, there are many open spaces, informal events,

activities in the evenings. So I think you can get very easily overwhelmed if you try to attend

everything. So you go there every morning at 9:00 AM and then you spend the whole day at the

conference. And then in the evening you go for some drinks and whatever, and then you come and

come very late. So I think it's very hard to do it all. So my tip is, I think it's always good to

think about what are your top picks? What would you like to visit? Maybe watch talks or maybe

some other events or something, and then to plan the rest according to your energy and how you feel

there in general, because it's very hard to be everywhere and to attend all these events.

Saipaikon afterwards. Yeah, right.

And if I'm a first time attendee, what's your top tip for a first time EuroPipe? Because

I've been to a few Django cons, but never been to something quite so large.

How do I handle the step up to the bigger environment? Yeah, I think EuroPipe is very

Of course it's bigger. So this is one of the things that might be different to you because there'll

be so many rooms and the halls are bigger, all the venues are bigger. I do see how it might be

intimidating for someone coming there for the first time, but we also have orientation session

for first time attendees. So if you're there for the first time, you could come to the orientation

session where you will get some advices, where to go, what to see. But in general,

we always remind our attendees of the Pac-Man rule, which means that if you're standing somewhere

with a group of people, you should always leave an empty space. So if someone would like to come

and join, then they can just fill in the gap. And my experience in general is that people are very

nice and friendly and you can just go and talk to everyone. I think open spaces might be more

interesting for first time attendees because they are small. So you are there in a smaller group of

people. So maybe like, I don't know, 10, 20 people depending on how many are there. So it's a very nice opportunity to chat with some people.

You can all introduce yourself. You can talk about topics you're passionate about.

It can be something about tech, maybe your favorite technologies, maybe

something like that, or it can be even something unrelated. So I think that's a nice opportunity

how to talk to people. Apart from that, we also have community booths. So this is a section with

many communities where you can go and talk to them. Every year we have the Django Software Foundation.

And we have also some other ones. For example, we have PyLadies, we have National PyCons, we have other foundations and

oss nonprofits so if you're a member of some community for example if you're a pie lady or

if you're a gsf member you can also go there chat with people find out what are they up to

so i think this is a nice experience as well i would maybe like to ask will about his experience

because last year django celebrated 20 years if i remember correctly and we had a small celebration

with a cake in the open spaces and the dsf was also our community partner so i would maybe like

to ask will if he could share his experience we might have to wait for him to come back though

back and when he does we will ask him that so the point being that there's there's lots of you know

you just go and join in and whatnot i always think that the

as programmers we're all introverts right we're not all introverts right some of us are slightly

more gregarious now but most of us are introverts it's all that awkwardness but it's everyone feels

always like when you go somewhere you feel a bit shy you know and you are hesitating to approach

people to talk to them but once you start you see that it's not actually that bad we also have a

quiet room and we have a low stimulation room so uh you know we have a lot of people who are

if you would like just to sit in quiet and just you know recharge uh just to spend some time

isolated from everyone without any external stimuli this is also an option so i would also

like to encourage everyone who feels like they need some quiet uh just to go there and to hide

to recharge their batteries before going back okay that sounds brilliant that sounds great so

about the language summit because it always used to be held at pycon us every year right but there's

a new arrangement to alternate between euro python icon can you tell us about that yes so there's a

euro python this is to give an opportunity to more people to attend uh because some people cannot get

to ds now for um other reasons uh the language summit is a summit where all c python core

developers gather and they talk together about topics that are relevant to the language summit

they talk about the road map so what's new happening they have discussions on various

uh features uh and we are super happy that this year we are hosting the language summit

and it will have so many uh core developers among us but it's one of like the big things that push

forward python right i think yeah i think this is one of very big things because this is the place

where everyone gathers so this gives them an opportunity to talk about features and to have

discussions uh but it's also a lot about hallway tracks what i was told by them because they're all

at the one place so they can uh discuss spark new ideas uh and such stuff you also attend

jango con sprints so uh i guess you have a similar experience with that yeah well yeah no i mean the

um together and it's such high bandwidth compared to what you can do on the issue tracker or

you know um

a mailing list or at this forum discussion that it really like this why we're doing jango on the

med i must put in a little punt there so go on then tell us about the keynotes because they're

six slots uh because we are a big conference three days so we have two slots a day uh i can

um announce now our first keynote speakers who are already um who have already confirmed their

attendance uh so this year uh for the first time guido van rossum is coming to poland and he will be

our keynote speaker uh we are having a special core pie episode with guido and with uh bukash

langa and uh pablo galindo salgado will be uh host of the podcast so they will record an episode um

chat live but uh

a jango comment that's amazing how did you bag guido that's a that's a real yeah so um

we asked guido if he would like to give a keynote at europython alone or if he would like to uh

record an episode on stage and he said that he would prefer to record an episode uh lots of us

thought that actually it would be very hard to pursue

with him because we know that he is not really into uh attention um he doesn't really like yeah

he doesn't really like when people approach him and ask him for selfies and you know this kind

of thing so we were a bit uh hesitant but we thought why not give it a try and you know just

pitch this idea to him and we were lucky that he said yes so um i think this is going to be pretty

this is going to be really cool and i think it's going to be really cool and i think it's going to

be really cool and i think it's going to be really cool and i think it's going to be really cool

formal chat this is basically a podcast episode so it will not be uh some like very prepared

presentation which i think would be very interesting to see some other side of him

uh i have listened to lots of podcasts with him and i have heard lots of his talks

uh and i'm a big fan of those informal conversations because i think if something

is not prepared and also as a conference speaker i have this experience that if something is

informal that you have like more opportunities to ask more questions some things you know just

spot

up so some questions just pop up on the fly so i think this is going to be pretty cool we have

five more keynote slots at this moment i cannot announce any of those we are working on on

confirmations from those keynote speakers but you can follow us on social media for more info we'll

be announcing them in the upcoming weeks this portion of django chat is brought to you by six

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of django girls so we had a small celebration at europython and we also had the workshop we held a

workshop last year as well so every year we have workshops for underrepresented groups in

programming uh sometimes the django girls sometimes it's humble data sometimes it's

piloted workshops sometimes it's all of those so this year we are going to have some workshops too

and for those who don't know django girl workshops uh those are workshops for beginners where

they have an opportunity to create a web uh in one day there's a mentor who is able to help

them with everything they get documentation and the web is a surprise surprise django yeah you're

django had done django girls had done 10 years and in those 10 years over 25 000 women have been

through django girls workshops we'll go globally which is amazing right but i didn't know it started

berlin uh there were two polish women ola sitarska and ola sendetska and they decided to use django

and python and to create workshop to help women to develop their ideas and since then the initiative

has spread through many uh countries throughout the world which i think is super cool super cool

he was there last year when django had his birthday party at um europe python which was nice for the

celebration where they ate cake and gathered all together unfortunately i couldn't be there because

i was at a different place at that time and there was also another cake that was on wednesday

evening when there was um there was a social event which was organized uh in collaboration

with the local python community uh we have uh in prague we have events called pivot i'm based in

prague and let's see if your partner was in prague uh so uh our events are called pivot which is a

monthly gathering of uh python enthusiasts uh so and it's held every third wednesday in a month

which was last year exactly the wednesday when euro python was taking place in prague

uh so we also we had a gathering uh in a very nice beer garden uh it was not it was outside

because it was very nice and sunny and warm and we also ordered the kid so we had a small cake and we

were all singing happy birthday django fantastic it was super funny because we cut the cake there

was someone you know cutting the cake and uh so we all went there to grab a piece and because this was

in an open beer garden where we booked 200 places but they were also like it was open for public and

some other people who were not part of the group came there and were like oh can we also have a

we can say only if you use django well okay that's reasonable the um there was a django birthday um

sort of celebration all year and so there was a site that listed all the places around the world

that held a little birthday event we had one in palo vigil for django on the med so we had a pina

django pony pinata which uh took took some bashing too right i remember there was a

cool technologies so i have a podcast uh where i record informal chats with uh open source

maintainers across europe and beyond it's called behind the comments so feel free to check it out

it's on youtube and it's on all podcasting platforms okay and we'll put the link in the show

the technologies you can use it's way more work than i expected but it's fun yeah no excuse right

reading what we've been doing so you've got a couple i see in the list in the notes

um i was thinking what kind of books to recommend there are two books that i read uh many years

ago and that I really like and that stayed in my memory.

So one of the books is called Humble Pie When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt

Parker.

This book is very interesting because it's written by a stand-up comedian and mathematician,

which is a very rare and very unique combination.

And he talks about all sort of funny and not so funny accidents or cases where there were

some math errors, which were obvious, but maybe not that visible.

So I found there lots of very interesting stories.

And the second book is called The Design of Everyday Things by John Norman.

And I thought that this would be a book about design and that this would be a very technical

book.

However, this is a book that actually really made me think about why are things designed

the way they are designed?

Because people use...

things not the way they're supposed to be used, but the way they are designed.

So there were lots of examples about things which might not be logical, but they are designed

in a certain way because, for example, for historical reasons, for cultural reasons,

or maybe only because someone was lazy and they just designed it in some way and then

everyone uses it in that way just because that's how it's been designed.

So I totally recommend it because after reading this book, I started more thinking about the

things I designed.

Whether it's a website or a pattern on a website or a physical object, I started thinking,

actually, how is this going to be used and is this the way it's supposed to be used?

Or is it just like my mindset, how I imagine that it should be used?

So I can totally recommend both books.

Have you read any of those?

I haven't looked at The Humble Pie, so I can check that one out.

Did you like it?

Yeah.

No, I mean, The Design of Everyday...

It's amazing.

Right?

As you were just saying about whether it's websites or whatever, it's like even if it's

a function, you know, you've got to design the API of the function so it's called in

the way that it's meant to be called, right?

What's this phrase?

The pit of success.

You've got to design for the pit of success.

You've got to make sure that people fall into it.

And there's just so much in there, particularly maybe working on UIs, things like giving an

indication that something's happening, giving feedback that something did happen, like these

kind of principles that it puts forward there.

Well, they just make you a better designer.

It's not about graphic design, right?

It's not about how things look necessarily, but it's about how they work.

And yeah, so that's a wonderful...

And this book made me think about this, actually.

Like, is this obvious from both and all perspectives are only from mine?

So that's a great suggestion.

I've got one.

It's called Hands on Rust, it's called.

I haven't got the actual physical book, so I just got an eBook, but it's by Herbert Warbeson.

It's from the Pragmatic Programming Book Publishers, Hands on Rust.

It's an introduction to the Rust programming language that you build a game with it.

And it's a few years old now, but it's still, you know, Rust is a nice, stable language

now.

It's not, you know, it does evolve, but the learning of it doesn't.

The learning of it bit doesn't really evolve very much anymore.

And I'm going through it with my 15-year-old.

So they were busy compiling drivers for their graphics card and downloading Python and doing

all this thing.

And they were like, right, come on, let's work through this.

So we're doing a chapter a week with that.

And I read it a few years ago, and it's a great book, and it's quite fun to be going

back through it.

So I can really recommend it.

If you're looking, pick up Rust.

And you know, you get to do something fun, you're building games rather than just going

through a tutorial.

So it's, you know, it's good.

And at the end, you know, you can be compiling it to WASM and running it in your browser

or whatnot.

So that's so cool.

Hands on Rust by Herbert Warbeson.

I was also searching for some materials on learning Rust.

So thank you for the recommendation.

It's a good book.

And it, you know, it builds up, it builds up, there's a nice learning curve to it.

I mean, you know, Rust is supposedly a very difficult, a more difficult language.

Well, it builds up in a way that makes it...

So anyway, it's quite good fun to go through it with my son.

So that's, that's cool.

Yeah.

Right.

I guess we should round up.

Will's, Will's texting me to say he's got an area issue with the internet in his, in

Brooklands.

I don't know what's going on there.

But so he can't join us for the rest of the show, but so just to wrap up, if I'm interested

in Europe Python, what should I look out for or how can I find out more?

So you can already purchase your ticket.

We are on all social media.

We have a website, europython.eu on social media.

Our handle is Europe Python.

So feel free to check out our YouTube channel.

We have lots of videos from previous editions.

So you can have a look just to see what kind of talks were there.

We also record shorts.

You can also have a look at the program, which is also released on our website and you can

follow us on all other social media.

So europython.eu and we'll put that in the show notes as well.

Well, Mir, thank you for joining us.

I hope the conference goes well.

I'm sure it will.

It sounds very exciting.

And you know, you'll have to let us know how it goes.

It was my honor and I am super happy to see you all at Europe Python.

Take care.

This was Django Chat.

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