EuroPython 2015

EuroPython 2015 is happening this week and we’re having the largest company meetup so far as a part of it, with more than 30 members from our fully remote-working team attending. The event which is held in Bilbao started on Monday and is providing great quality talks, sessions, and plenty of tasty Spanish dishes.

As sponsors, we’ve been privileged with a nice booth where we are connecting with Pythonistas, discussing scraping practices, and giving away lots of swag such as hats, t-shirts, stickers, bottle-openers, and clocks.

If you’re attending to EuroPython, make sure to drop by and get one of these. Our booth is in the main area (exhibition hall and lounge area) of the Euskalduna Conference Center. 🙂

On the conference’s first day Zytans participated in two talks: one about Frontera, hosted by Alexander Sibiryakov, and one about testing, hosted by Eugene Amirov - both available below.

By Tuesday we hosted two more talks: one about best practices on web scraping, by Shane Evans, and one about Scrapy, by Juan Riaza - also available below. In addition to that, we’ve had a poster session about Frontera and a recruiting session sharing job opportunities and the perks of working for Zyte .

On the third day, Lluis Esquerda hosted a talk about City Bikes, a personal project developed by him on bike-sharing networks (check the video below). As the night came we went to Hotel Ercilla, where EuroPython organizers were hosting the conference's social event (a.k.a. "Pyntxos Night"). There, we were able to enjoy the nice food, other attendees' companionship, and also to have some tricky moves on the dance floor. 🙂

After resting from the party, Thursday came, and with it Juan Riaza's Scrapy Helpdesk. We invited attendees to join us and learn about Scrapy, also getting a couple of swags in our booth.

This Friday Juan Riaza hosted a 3 hours training on Scrapy, sharing tips and building spiders in real-time with the attendees. We also went to the Guggenheim Museum where we met the "Mom Spider" or, as some people say, one of Zyte's ancestors.

With the weekend came the EuroPython sprints, where we teamed up to port Scrapy to Python 3. During the sprint, we managed to unblock our main problem with the port, the handling of URLs and headers and then migrated Request and Response classes so finally it is possible to divide the work and port each component independently. We also managed to split the Scrapy Selectors into a separate library (called Parsel) which reached a stable point and Scrapy now depends on it (we're working on its documentation to make an official release). We continued the Python 3 porting in the following weeks back home and got important contributions from the community that helped increase our test coverage under python3 from 19% to 54% (see current progress in this badge).

Here is the full recorded version of the talks given by Zytans:

Alexander's talk "Frontera: open-source large-scale web crawling framework"

Eugene's talk "Sustainable way of testing your code"

Shane's talk "Advanced Web Scraping"

Juan's talk on "Dive into Scrapy"

Lluis' talk "CityBikes: bike-sharing networks around the world"

It was an amazing experience, our special thanks to the EuroPython organization and for all team members that made it happen!