Athens Python users unite! This was the call to action of our first meeting of the year which took place here at Starttech Ventures.

Athens Python Users Meetup at Starttech

That’s right, on January 31 we had the honor to host the first Athens Python Users Meetup of 2019. For those of you that are not fully aware of our story so far, we are out to support and help programming communities in many ways.

So, what was it all about this time?

A few words about the Athens Python Users

Athens Python Users is an independent, active community that keeps Greek Python programmers plugged-in to current Python-related trends. The community recurrently organizes meetups that bring together Python-devoted programmers to discuss and exchange valuable knowledge and experience on their favorite programming language.

We love Python

From our perspective, our incubated startups that develop exclusively SaaS, B2B solutions are in some way using Python programming. And that was the reason for this initiative. We wanted to bring the Python community within our premises for a while, in order to learn, share and exchange knowledge.

This meetup’s guest speaker was Pantelis Petridis, Co-Founder of Elorus, a portfolio company of ours that successfully graduated our program. Founded back in 2014, the company started here in Starttech receiving early stage funding from us. In 2016, Elorus managed to receive an additional investment from Viva. Today, with over 15000 users and growth 90% per year, Elorus is a leading company in fin-tech industry of Greece.

With a complete online invoicing software that deals with huge volumes of data, challenging as it may be, Elorus needs a corresponding technology. Pantelis, as guest speaker elaborated on his valuable experience on this.

The topic of this Athens Python Users Meetup was:

“Horizontal scaling using Sharding in Django”

Django is an open source Python-based framework that is used in complicated database-driven websites such as Instagram.

Data sharding is a method of dividing and organizing your data into subsets that you can manage through different databases.

Thinking ahead

So, the whole presentation was about things that you need to consider in advance before you implement such applications. Customization parameters, related dangers and challenges in database transactions were some of the basic subtopics that we discussed.

The presentation triggered a fruitful discussion with questions from the audience on how to use this framework in your context. And factors you need to examine in order to apply this solution efficiently, in relevant case scenarios.

Of course, at the end, there was plenty of time available for networking over snacks and beers. As, of course, happens with any meetup that respects itself.

As the organizers informed us, the next Athens Python meetup will be on February. You can find more about Python events here: https://www.meetup.com/Athens-Python-Users-Meetup/

More where that came from…

From our perspective, it was a great start for 2019. It is, after all, delightful to have provided a place for part of the Greek Python community to come together. After all, we love making new friends! We promise that one way or another, we’ll assist and support the community in any way we can. We will, therefore, be unreservedly happy to host relevant events in the future.

Thank you Athens Python Users!

Konstantina Ferentinou Konstantina Ferentinou

The Starttech Ventures Content Marketing Writer. Studied Computer Engineering and Informatics at the University of Patras. She has working experience in technical writing, sales and support related roles. She now focuses on content creation. Channeling her creativity into writing, she hones her ability to communicate the right message through various content types.