Last week I attended PyData Berlin 2016. It was my first non-academic conference. I was not sure if it was going to be interesting or going beyond things I can see on the Internet anyway. But since I’ve never been to Berlin, had an open invitation by a friend of mine, and it’s 6.5h by train from Warsaw, I decided to go.

td;dr: It was worth my time and I really enjoyed the event.

Talks

Talks I have found the most interesting:

Also, these were good:

And talks I missed, but I am sure were great:

If your beloved talk is not there, don’t cry - most likely it was in a parallel session. (Also, in general topic selection and quality of presentation was good.)

I had a lightning talk: Teaching Machine Learning. I should write a blog post on it one day (especially on the 5-day data analysis summer school for sociology students and researchers, as now materials are in Polish). As for now, it is implicitly covered in Data science intro for math/phys background.

Other take-home lessons

There are so many ex-physicists. I even heard Hey, I saw you… on ICPS .

. Many methods are new, so it’s crucial to learn them (and how can they be tailored to your tasks); sometimes being an expert with 10-year experience is physically impossible.

The number of participants was optimal (200? I hate huge conferences).

If other PyData events are of similar quality, it’s not my last time there! :)

Thanks to the organizers!