On the evening of Monday the 10th of October, Delivery Hero welcomed PyBerlin, and many fellow Python enthusiasts, to our Headquarters in Berlin. Using our office as a space where the Berlin tech community can gather together to share ideas, work together on problems, and inspire one another, is something we are passionate about. Covid put a strain on in-person events – we are delighted to be hosting meetups at our office once again.
In this article, I will talk you through our meet-up with PyBerlin, and share my learnings from the talks on the night with you all. I’ve also included a video of the talks from the meet-up, in case you didn’t get the chance to attend this time!
PyBerlin is an inclusive community for anyone interested in Python – at all levels, from complete beginners to seasoned professionals. Delivery Hero uses the Python programming language extensively; our source code repositories contain several million lines of active Python code, powering Data Science/Engineering, Backend APIs, Infrastructure and Machine Learning applications. For this reason, it was a great pleasure for us to host PyBerlin for the first time, and we look forward to hosting further events together in the future. We enjoyed some delicious pizza and drinks while discussing intriguing topics with like-minded people.
About the Talks
The first talk given by Marcelo Trylesinski detailed his personal journey becoming the all-time top expert in FastAPI, as recognized on the FastAPI website itself. He then described how he used this experience to join the maintenance team of Uvicorn and Starlette, the underlying web server technologies powering FastAPI.
Alongside this backstory, Marcelo explained the genesis of FastAPI. We learnt that the original plan for this framework was described in a long GitHub issue comment on the Starlette project by the primary author of FastAPI, Sebastián Ramírez.
Marcelo’s talk was an inspirational story for people starting their first steps in the open source ecosystem. The Q&A session raised interesting questions about the sustainability of open source software development for maintainers.
Finally, it was a particularly interesting talk for Delivery Hero engineers working in Python, as our own internal data shows that FastAPI is quickly becoming the preferred framework for new Python APIs, and rightly so!
Figure showing increasing adoption of the FastAPI framework at Delivery Hero
After a short break for refreshments, we moved onto the next talk about PyScript by Antonio Cuni. Pycript is a new project open-sourced by Anaconda to run Python in the browser. Antonio was keen to stress that the project could not exist without Pyodide, which is itself a port of CPython to WebAssembly/Emscripten.
Antonio demonstrated (live!) real-time usage of the Python datetime module to print ‘now’, a powerful indication that even the full standard library can run in a browser!
One interesting aspect of this project that was mentioned in the Q&A is its goal to bring ‘Programming to the 99%’. According to Antonio, this goal influences fundamental decisions in the design of PyScript. For example, there has been a proposal to abandon the traditional but skeuomorphic ‘print’ function, in favor of a more easily understandable ‘display’ function for the common use case of ‘displaying text,’ which makes more sense in the context of a browser.
Finally, Daniel Rios presented his entertaining talk “Much ado about None”, which discussed the fundamental nature of nothing, with reference to Babylonian bookkeeping methods and detailed etymology of the word ‘nothing’ itself. After this elucidating introduction, we were treated to a detailed overview with live examples of the special status None has in the Python programming language.
Meetups at Delivery Hero
The in-person meet-up was a great experience for the attendees and for Delivery Hero engineers interested in Python.
Are you interested in coming to our next meet-up? Then be sure to follow us on our Tech Twitter channel ‘@Tech_DH’ for the details of future events. We will definitely be hosting one with PyBerlin again in the near future!
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