Nephila 2015 Conferences

Nephila's agenda: the conferences we will participate in

Greetings, readers! We’re getting ready to set sail for new horizons, both in Italy as well as abroad, so here’s a quick assessment of our two-months agenda that we’ll take as Nephila prepares to chart more territory in the IT frontier.

Firstly, we’re gearing up to attend this year’s Pycon UK conference, which centres around the Python programming language and will take place September 18 - 21 at the Innovation Park in Coventry. From our past experiences, we have really enjoyed the spirit of community there and although we were newcomers last year, we were welcomed and had a splendid time. We met some wonderfully charismatic personalities there, both among academia as well as other developers, and the organisers of the event proved extremely hospitable and enthusiastic. At this year’s Pycon UK, we’ll work with DIVIO, our business partner and the founder of the Django CMS, and will attend the conference as a Silver sponsor in order to better network with others in the English IT world; the event normally attracts about 350 attendees a year from all across the UK and beyond. We’re also excited to note that Iacopo will represent our team by giving a lecture entitled, “Testing Applications for Django CMS”

Django: Under the Hood is another excellent conference that has been dedicated to the Django framework, which is in its second year running. It will take place November 5th - 7th and be hosted at the Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It comes as no surprise that the event was popular enough to sell out in just a matter of hours, as attendees anticipate networking with core developers of the Django platform. Our very own Iacopo will speak at the conference on the subject of the django CMS platform, but will shift focus to a new and interesting aspect of it: application compatibility amongst Django components.

For the Italian conferences, however, we will join two events, which focus on issues that are diametrically opposed: the From the Fontconference (entitled Fontend in Wonderland this year) and the PG Day event.

As the title of the conference implies, the Frontend in Wonderland event is dedicated exclusively to frontend development and will take place at the Teatro Duse in Bologna from 17th - 18th September. Guido, Matteo, and Carlo, the vanguard of our front-end development team, will participate in the conference. Many are the topics that will be discussed such as news about CSS usability and responsiveness. Influential speakers will attend the conference, including leading speakers such as Anna Debenham, the author of "Front End Style Guides", Zoe Gillenwater author of the "Stunning CSS3: A Project-Based guide to the Latest in CSS" and "Flexible Web Design", and finally James Hall, who wrote the world-renowned jsPDF library.

On the other hand, the PG Day event will dedicate discussion solely to topics revolving around PostgreSQL, an open-source technology for database object management, which we have also incorporated into the projects we manage. This initiative is particular in that it has been structured radically different than others. Normally, events such as these are held over a few days, but this one will occur for only one and will concentrate its efforts on discussions and sprint exercises. The conference, organised by ITPUG and scheduled to take place onOctober 23, will be held at the Prato Chamber of Commerce. Carlo has been a part of the association for quite some time and regularly contributes to the event’s success. Given the amazing support this new technology has offered us, we have given it our official seal of approval by becoming Gold sponsors of the event.

These technical conferences are a useful opportunity to to meet new figures within the same ecosystems, as well as with similar profiles, which we hope will establish new relationships (professional and otherwise) and strengthen existing ones. Why wouldn’t we, considering that it can give new life to projects, both big and small? In our next post, we’ll talk more about other news, impressions, and goals to report here. Stay tuned!