This year Hacarus sponsored PYCON Taiwan as part of our ongoing engagement with with PYCON community, below follows a conference report written by Ninz Eclarin, one of our Engineers at the Manila Development Center.
I’ve been to some PyCon events in Asia before, but PyCon Taiwan strikes some awesome distinction.
I mean, who can say no to a great selection of food and drinks provided at the venue? Unlimited MilkTea for the win!
But aside from the awesome food, PyCon Taiwan seems to be one of the most organised and well planned event across the region.
Event Details
The venue for the event is Academia Sinica’s Humanities and Social Science Building. One might think that choosing a university as a venue has a downside but this is clearly not the case.
It was a well suited venue for such event as it has several well-sized lecture halls where each talk can be held. There is also one big lecture hall where the keynotes and other activities such as lightning talks were conducted.
You can see booths for partners and sponsors placed across the hallway. A lot of attendees roam around during free time to visit these booths. There are plenty of space to roam around and talk to other attendees.
The three day event, which started on Friday Sept 22, had lot of activities installed for the attendees.
Topics and Talks
The speakers in PyCon Taiwan brought about topics ranging from web technologies to embedded systems application. This reflects the wide range of technological fields present in the country.
Looking at the speakers, a lot of them also came from different background and different nationalities. The attendees enjoyed the diverse set of speakers and topics as this gives them lots of new learnings and takeaways.
Hacarus members give two talks in this event. Takashi Someda, our CTO, gave a talk on how we built our own library for Sparse Modeling and how it can be used by other developers.
I also gave a talk about the challenges of software developers face when working with a data science team. My talk is complementary to Takashi’s talk as the experiences and learnings that I have shared is deeply rooted on my experiences in working with data scientists at hacarus.
Hacarus Booth!
This year, Hacarus participated as a sponsor for the event. We had placed a booth where people can ask about what we do in the company.
Adrian, Takashi, Ryan and myself take turns on answering questions and introducing our company to a lot of attendees. Even though there are some communication barriers, Ryan did a good job in communicating with non-english speaking attendees.
We got a lot of positive feedback from interested people. Though most of them are unaware of Sparse Modeling, they surely showed a lot of interest in adopting and trying out this method.
I also think they enjoyed the Japanese snacks we brought!
Promoting Python!
The event allowed us to showcase what we are doing at Hacarus. I think this is a good venue for developers and technology enthusiast to discover new approach to fields such as machine learning. We also learned a lot from other talks that showcases how they use python on their specific fields.
Since python is simple yet powerful language, a lot of people are using it on their projects. I think this is one of the key points why PyCon events are attended by a lot of people. From beginner to advance level, python users are able to apply their learnings on different fields. This is what makes PyCon so successful.
The organising team also did a great job in hosting the event. The talks and activities complimented each other. Overall it was a great event! Now I can say that I am looking forward to PyCon TW 2020!
