Highlights of JuliaCon 2020

JuliaCon stands for Julia Conference and it’s an annual educational/promotional event that Julia Computing organizes. The latter is the Massachusetts based company that manages the development and evolution of the programming language. So, JuliaCon is its way of promoting the language and keeping everyone interested in it updated on its recent developments.

JuliaCon is primarily for programmers and members of the scientific community employing Julia in their work. However, it also appeals to Julia enthusiasts and anyone interested in the ecosystem of the language, as well as its numerous applications. It’s not targeted at data scientists per se though lately there are several sessions in the conference that involve Machine Learning and A.I. since lots of people are interested in these areas. Note that most of the people involved in these packages are not professional data scientists, though some of them are familiar with the field and have written papers about it (mostly academic papers). So, if you are looking to learn about data science in this conference you may be disappointed, yet if you just wish to explore what Julia brings to the table when it comes to data science tools, you may be in for a treat.

This year several interesting things were revealed in the JuliaCon, which I attended. Namely, the Tuesday workshop on improving Julia code performance and compatibility with other programming languages was truly worth it as it covered a variety of tweaks that can make a script use less memory and/or work faster. Also, being able to incorporate Python and C code in a Julia script was something that was covered thoroughly, more than any documentation page could.

Unfortunately, some sessions weren’t properly synced and were either delayed or altogether missing from the live stream (at least on my Firefox browser). This definitely took away from the whole conference experience. Perhaps if the whole conference was done on Zoom, it would have been a smoother experience. The Q&A chat in the workshops was a nice touch though and added a lot to them.

The sessions themselves were pretty good overall, covering a variety of topics, from the more technical to the more application-oriented. They were organized in different tracks, making it easy to find the session you were most interested in. The Interactive data dashboards with Julia and Stipple session stood out. Even though it was a fairly short one, it was very relevant to data science work and with good examples, showcasing its functionality. I’d definitely recommend you watch the recording of it, which should be available by now at the Julia YouTube channel, along with the other sessions of the conference.

JuliaCon usually takes place in either the US or Europe. This year it was Europe’s turn to host the conference and it was scheduled to take place in Lisbon, Portugal. Although that laid-back Mediterranean capital would be ideal for such a conference (definitely more accessible than London, where it took place a couple of years ago), this year for the first time it took place online. This was due to the safety measures related to Covid-19 that impacted logistics severely. Anyway, if all goes well, it's expected that next year it will take place in the US. If you wish to delve more into Julia feel free to check out my books on the subject. Cheers!