Python Barcelona Meetup

For the month of April, we have two awesome talks about Python Decorators and building a load balancer using the new NoGIL biilds.

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Schedule:

• 👋 & 🗣️ 18:45: Welcome and Talks
• 🍕 & 🍻 20:00: Networking, food and drinks!
• 👋 21:00: Bye!

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• ➡️ What: Why Decorators?
• 📢 Who: Dirk Lüdtke
• ⏱ Duration: 30 minutes
• 👅 Language: English
• 🧐 Abstract: Python first introduced decorators way back in 2004 with version 2.4, as a powerful tool for enhancing the behavior of functions and (later on) classes all in a neat and concise way. You are probably familiar with some popular decorators like @classmethod, @app.route (Flask), @validator (Pydantic), and @tf.function (TensorFlow). While most of us happily use them, few actually create our own. Decorators are convenient, but they’re not without their quirks. As I write this, I’m still a little on the fence about using them too liberally. But fear not! By the time we get to the talk, I'll share some intriguing insights, show you where decorators truly shine, and highlight a few hilarious examples of flagrant misuse.

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• ➡️ What: Building a NoGIL Load Balancer in 30 minutes
• 📢 Who: Alvaro Duran
• ⏱ Duration: 30 minutes
• 👅 Language: English
• 🧐 Abstract: Load balancers are widespread nowadays because most software systems are web-centric and service oriented. However, they’re extremely complex to build, because they must be very performant and use sophisticated algorithms to route traffic. Until recently, you couldn’t use Python to build one, because even though it would make the code simpler, the GIL prevented multiple threads from executing Python at the same time.

Now that you can, what are the practical implications in your day-to-day work?
In this talk, we’re going to live code a load balancer in Python. This will help us understand the pros and cons of using modules such as asyncio, threading and concurrent.futures, and what changes when we remove the GIL from the way.
Whether you’re building systems that demand concurrency (such as AI models or DevOps pipelines), or you’re just curious about how tools like gUnicorn or Starlette work under the hood, you’ll come away with practical insights on how to start off the NoGIL era on the right foot.