I’ve had the great pleasure of attending PyConLT 2019 – my first trip to Lithuania. I had no idea what to expect (I’ve never been to this part of Europe) – Vilnius is a lovely city full of lovely Pythonistas. There’s a bunch of lovely art hanging underneath bridges, an amazing Soviet Palace of Arts and Sports and a number of castles – it really is very lovely here.
This keynote talk builds on a couple of previous iterations, here I spoke on “Citizen Science with Python“:
- Dirty North-Macedonian air analysis by Gorjan (from PyDataAmsterdam)
- Improving child births via Anna (from PyDataWarsaw)
- Monitoring saved and relocated Orangutangs using SciPy and drones via Dirk (from PyDataAmsterdam)
- Improving political engagement in the run up to the UK EU elections (via myself and colleagues at a political hackathon)
- Short demo of using open data in a Notebook to visualise the 30 year increase in new breweries in the UK
The keynote was aimed at a mostly-engineer audience, to show that “with the power of the keyboard” we all have skills to make the world a better place that most of our fellow citizens lack.
Whilst here I got the chance to get involved in two very interesting discussions:
- How can others who want to start a meetup get some advice? This (hopefully) leads to the formation of a new PyDataVilnius (it was announced on stage in the closing notes – yay!) and the expansion of a similar group back in Cyprus (which has already had some positive feedback – yay!)
- How can folk take the next step with their data science project which led to interesting chats over lunch
I spent most of my time on the PyData track and met a load of very smart local and international folk, organiser Aidis and his volunteer crew did a really good job of pulling this together. I also got to meet PyDataBratislava co-organiser Radovan and PyDataPrague co-organiser Jan (we had the pleasure to meet last year when I went to their first meeting). These events really do help to build such a great international network.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.