In the next blog spots, I’ll share a recap of this technical conference.
Snowcamp is a technical conference on IT development that has been held in Grenoble in winter for the past ten years. Most (if not all?) of the talks are in French.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to a conference like this: lack of time, urgent production work and, to some extent, family life. What prompted me to go? One of my Internet buddies, Nicolas Delsaux (senior dev at Zenika in Lille), with whom I share an interest in the profession and a taste for science fiction. ‘You should come to Snowcamp, it’s not far from where you live’. Thanks for the suggestion, mate!
I spent three very cool days there, meeting interesting people and attending relevant talks that gave me ideas for my practice.
Here’s a little recap: what I’m taking away from the conference, and how it could help me/us in my/our day-to-day work at SECUTIX.
(no, I’m not shouting, our official typeface is in CapsLock mode)
Context and organisation of the conference:
Snowcamp takes place at Grenoble’s WTC, a convenient conference centre (located near the train station and right next to the hotel, 15′ from the city centre).
The conference is organised as follows:
Wednesday: universities. Two three-hour workshops, subject to prior registration.
Thursday and Friday: in the morning, a full keynote, then two talks, a 1.5-hour lunch break on site (very good) and three other talks in the afternoon. A Meet & Greet on Thursday evening.
Saturday: optional outing to the snow, skiing (not included in the conference price).
Workshops
Wednesday, 9.30am-12.30pm:
Python royal, by Julien Lenormand and Jonathan Gaffiot, from Kaizen solutions.
This was an excellent hands-on workshop, the aim of which was to present a suite of tools for industrial Python development. In the first hour, we installed the tools and created a very simple mini-application. Then you deploy and activate the code analysis tools, style checker, typing checker, test executions, packaging, and so on.
For me, who has been in the java world for one or two millennia, this is like discovering the equivalent of IntelliJ (=PyCharm, JetBrains), maven (more or less UV), Sonar(Qube), CheckStyle, etc. in the python world.
The keys to this python world are PyCharm and UV, an orchestrator that manages dependencies and environments (like maven, but more modern).
The workshop was very well put together, and the presenters were very approachable, with a wealth of experience of python in production.
Take-away
My team has an internal API overlay project that needs to be written in Python. I’m going to explore the PyCharm+UV options with fastapi to develop them robustly.
Wednesday 14h30-17h30
You too can give style to your data with Grafana, by Thomas Jouve, from Sopra.
Hands-on workshop on using Grafana and discovering its inner workings, its logic and its dashboard-building capabilities. It gave me the opportunity to configure things in Grafana for the first time.
Take-away
A little knowledge of Grafana and ideas for modifying our monitoring dashboards.
