We attended PyGrunn, a major Python conference in Groningen. It’s always great to learn from others and share knowledge. Here’s a summary of some of the talks we attended.
Mike Huls spoke about layered architecture. For example, separating business logic from view classes and backend architecture from input validation. This makes sense, especially as apps grow. We see this in many projects: as time goes on and complexity increases, separation of concerns makes a project easier to maintain.
Kees Hink (that’s me!) spoke about the Zed editor. It’s fast, and it doesn’t get in the way. Enough said.
Bart Dorlandt spoke about paperless-ngx, an open-source document management system. Keeping track of mail from government agencies (taxes, etc.) can be difficult. He now uses this for all professional mail he receives, aided by some scripts he created.
Bart Dorlandt also gave a presentation on applying validation to a large legacy database containing unvalidated JSON data. Applying rules gradually is a challenge most developers face when dealing with older codebases. This talk provided valuable insights.
Sven Vintges spoke about how current advances in AI are changing development. He argues that it’s a “homecoming”: As developers, we can focus less on coding syntax and more on translating the project domain into the coding domain. This was originally what programmers did, and it might allow us to focus on that and derive satisfaction from it.
Finally, the closing keynote by Gijs Molenaar illustrated how Spotify transformed the music market. His parents owned a record store, which they eventually had to close. Similarly, the traditional way of programming is being transformed by AI.
Next year, PyGrunn will merge with AIGrunn. This isn’t a surprising choice, as many of today’s talks also focused on AI.
For more summaries, read Reinout van Rees’ blog.