It's been now 10 years ago when Blue Yonder started the first sponsoring of a python conference at Europython Florence. Since then we have been either sponsoring and/or organizing at least one python event per year.
Blue Yonder History
It's been now 10 years ago when Blue Yonder started the first sponsoring of a python conference at Europython Florence. Since then we have been either sponsoring and/or organizing at least one python event per year. For me personally this has always been part of my internal mission to convince leadership and fellow team leads that participating in the open source community has great benefit on employee development and on the overall corporate culture. Young Engineers learn to represent the company and connect to other open source developers.
This year PyCon.DE was hosted in Berlin. With 1500 attendees the conference has been growing tremendously over the past years. The Berlin Congress Center is of course a very professional venue and the orga committee did an awesome job to run a smooth conference overall. Still I hope the PyCon.de will be hosted in another city next year (maybe even in Switzerland or Austria). Leipzig, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Basel, Bern or Wien would be awesome locations for 2024.
Cyclic Boosting
The main topic of this year's Blue Yonder conference booth was around the open sourcing of Cyclic Boosting. Cyclic Boosting has been the core ML algorithm of Blue Yonder for many years. Felix Wick gave a talk about exploring the power of cyclic boosting: a python-pure, explainable, and efficient ml method
We also hosted a small Kaggle ML/Retail Challenge where the open source community can apply their ML algorithms on a typical retail challenge and benchmark it against a baseline CyclicBoosting Algorithm.
The challenge is to accurately forecast the demand of 300 retail products across 20 retail stores. Accurately forecasting demand is crucial for retailers because it allows them to make informed decisions regarding inventory management, pricing strategies, and sales projections, all of which can have a significant impact on a retailer's bottom line. In short, demand forecasting is an essential tool for retailers looking to optimize their operations and maximize profits so they can stay competitive in a crowded retail landscape.
It was quite fun to discuss solutions and technical approaches at our booth, and people really engaged to beat the master implementation from Felix.
Notable PyCon.DE talks
Wald: A Modern and Sustainable Analytics Stack from Florian Wilhelm.
The name WALD-stack stems from the four technologies it is composed of, i.e. a cloud-computing Warehouse like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, the open-source data integration engine Airbyte, the open-source full-stack BI platform Lightdash, and the open-source data transformation tool DBT.
Pragmatic ways of using Rust in your data project from Christopher Prohm
Writing efficient data pipelines in Python can be tricky. The standard recommendation is to use vectorized functions implemented in Numpy, Pandas, or the like. However, what to do, when the processing task does not fit these libraries? Using plain Python for processing can result in lacking performance, in particular when handling large data sets.
Actionable Machine Learning in the Browser with PyScript from Valero Maggio
PyScript brings the full PyData stack in the browser, opening up to unprecedented use cases for interactive data-intensive applications. In this scenario, the web browser becomes a ubiquitous computing platform, operating within a (nearly) zero-installation & server-less environment.
Hiring
We are looking for new talent in our AI/ML Teams at Blue Yonder. If you are interested in one of the following positions:
- https://2023.pycon.de/job-board/14/ Senior Machine Learning Engineer
- https://2023.pycon.de/job-board/15/ Full Stack Developer
- https://2023.pycon.de/job-board/16/ Senior Data Engineer
Or just reach out to me or you can of course also directly apply to https://jda.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/JDA_Careers.