These days, every single living being has heard of Bitcoin. Some of those know that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency (crypto for short) and, within those, a few know that it runs on top of a technology called Blockchain.

It has existed for some years now, and there are many different blockchains. For crypto, their role is to provide a framework upon which one can execute monetary transactions in a verifiable, irreversible manner. But some of those blockchains provide extra funcionality: something known as a smart contract.

Basically, a smart contract is some computer code that runs on top of a blockchain (thus, it has cryptography-enabled credibility) that enforces some rules to be obeyed by the involved parties.

In twenty-five minutes, I will demonstrate how you can develop a simple (but valuable) smart contract from scratch: a payment manager, which can be integrated to your projects.

One of the greatest challenges with the modern computing technologies is the effective distribution and use of computing power. This is a relevant discussion when you bring computing-intensive tasks (such as data processing) and/or high-demand scenarios (such as having to keep up with a large number of simultaneous users) to the table.

If your mission is to setup a simple computer cluster to do work in parallel, the first barrier you'll face is the great complexity involved in designing a distributed system: load balancing, network and communication problems, scalability, etc.

Luckily, there are many tools out there that can reduce the burden of developing such technological solutions by taking care of the most challenging tasks. One of such is Gearman, which provides a generic, flexible mechanism for distributing tasks between a group of machines. Its practical distribution approach lets you scale up and make the most of your machines in a easy, straight-forward manner.

The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate how you can use Gearman to easily do work in parallel without having to know too much about the finer details of distributed systems design. We'll be wrapping a Python code for a Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) in a Gearman script (note: the focus will not be the CNN part).

These days, every single living being has heard of Bitcoin. Some of those know that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency (crypto for short) and, within those, a few know that it runs on top of a technology called Blockchain.

This technology has boomed just alongside Bitcoin since the year 2008, and it is being used in many different sectors of society (having numerous examples worldwide): finance, industry, healthcare, energy, government.

Ever since then, the other technologies related to it are in a ever-changing state, with rapid development cycles, in such a fashion that it is hard to keep pace.

The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate how you can use the python's latest libraries to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. You will also learn how you can integrate a smart contract to a Python application: we will analyze a case study of a simple REST API built with Django 2.0.