The week of EuroSciPy 2025 has just ended, and now it’s time to take stock of all the various talks I attended, those that I missed out on, and some other personal observations.
In this post, I will be going over my personal experience with the trip and the talk I gave on the first day.
The city, the venue, and the organization
This year, the conference was held in the AGH University of Kraków, Poland. This being my very first time in Poland, I had no idea what to expect. What I found was a beautiful city, great and well maintained infrastructure, and everyone speaking in English. At least the last part was a surprise and a nice change of pace, given my typical experience in France 🙈.
At the university we were spoiled with coffee, tea and snacks all day long. I must admit I did not love the food, but I believe that’s mostly to do with my own personal tastes rather than the actual quality.
I was travelling with three other scikit-learn maintainers: Olivier Grisel, Guillaume Lemaitre and Loic Esteve. I’m thankful they had me tag along: it’s always interesting to listen in to their conversations, and I always learn a lot from just discussing with them.
Overall, the organizers and volunteers were incredibly helpful, and I think everything went according to plan. At least, from what I could tell.
My main gripe with the whole event was that it was held in the week starting on the 18th of August, meaning that we had to travel right on the weekend where everyone goes back from vacation. Being on vacation myself, I did not have the time to prepare my talk as well as I wanted. I really hope that the dates for next year’s event will be better.
My tutorial: “Timeseries forecasting with skrub”
Yes, that’s right. I was a speaker this time! My first time doing a tutorial in a public conference, at that. Indeed, I was very nervous about it, and while I had a lot of people come and tell me it was great, I still felt it was not as good as it could have been, and I’ve been mulling over how to make it better for the next time. At least, I can say that I am thinking of the next time!
The material we used for the tutorial is available in this repository. It was adapted from the masterclass that Olivier and Guillaume prepared for Probabl. (the masterclass is available here), cutting down on a lot of material, and adding a few exercises for the tutorial.
I feel like the main problem with this tutorial is that it had two complicated parts to it: preparing data for forecasting, and using the skrub Data Ops. In a tutorial like the one we did, this made the 90 minutes extremely dense and hard to follow. I even had the same problem when I followed the masterclass, and I knew what Data Ops were!
I’m already planning to address that in the next version by just removing the forecasting altogether, and instead using a simpler example to force the audience to deal only with the Data Ops.
Another problem was with the exercises: they were too few and far inbetween, and they were way too complicated for the audience to actually solve in the limited time we gave them. A lot of complex operations that would require a bunch of digging in the examples and the documentation.
I absolutely have to come up with simpler examples, and in general with things that anyone can do given the information provided up to that point. In most of the other tutorials the speakers let us play around with the software for much longer, which I think was a far better strategy than what we ended up doing.
Finally, and this is entirely due to my nervousness and not having a clue what to say in a tutorial, I completely forgot to introduce myself, which was funny, but also not good. Thankfully, Guillaume covered for me when he did the second section of the tutorial.
I’m still fairly happy with the outcome, but I still think we could have done better, and I’ll make sure the next version will be better.
Oh, and if you want to judge for yourself whether I’m being too harsh on myself, you can find the full thing on Youtube.
Conclusions
Overall, it was a very positive experience: there were a lot of interesting talks, interesting people, and interesting packages. The trip went well and the city was very nice (I still hate travelling, but that’s just me). I finally presented my first tutorial, with somewhat mixed results (at least in my head…), so now I know what to do for the next. I’m really happy I went.
Stay tuned for the next post, where I’ll go over the talks I liked the most and share pointers and links to the material.
Cheers!