Why you should attend JuliaCon 2022 (as a Data Scientist) 🧑💻
The annual JuliaCon conference is right around the corner (July 27th — 29th online). JuliaCon is the largest Julia conference of the year and features workshops, talks, social events, and much more! Since moving online in 2020, the conference has remained free for attendees but registration is still required (get your ticket today).
If you are unsure of Julia’s use cases or the like, you might want to check out some of the below articles:
What to expect at JuliaCon 2022 🧐
Back in 2019 (the last in-person conference), there was an awesome video made highlighting the JuliaCon experience, if you want to get a glimpse into what you can expect, check this out:
At a high level, JuliaCon’s typically include updates on core packages and the language itself, presentations on cutting edge use cases, networking opportunities, and workshops to help you get hands-on experience using the language.
As a data scientist, you might be asking yourself, “Okay, I get it, Julia is great, but how is JuliaCon actually going to help me?”, well, here are a few ideas:
- Cutting edge use case presentations can help give a good idea as to what sort of problems people are solving with Julia. Your company might have similar challenges so seeing the way others have solved an issue using Julia can be a massive opportunity. On top of that, it might also spark some inspiration for cool companies to work with (more on this later).
- Even if you don’t already know Julia, the conference can be a great place to start learning! See the “Statistics from the ground up” workshop below 👇. It walks through all of the relevant steps needed to do statistics and data science in Julia. Yoni (the workshop presenter) is also the author of a foundational book titled Statistics in Julia which closely mirrors the workshop he gave in 2021.
- Updates on the core packages and the language itself is an extremely important part of JuliaCon. Last year for example, Bogumił Kamiński announced the 1.0 release of DataFrames.jl (the Pandas equivalent in Julia) which was a huge step for the Julia Data Science ecosystem:
4. Beyond the technical talks, JuliaCon is an awesome opportunity to connect with the community. I could go on for a long time about this but the main point is that the Julia community is incredible. Without such amazing folks, the Julia ecosystem would not be where it is today. Built into the JuliaCon schedule are lots of synchronous and asynchronous chances to connect with people. In previous years, we used GatherTown for real-time video interactions during social gatherings and also during the poster session. For asynchronous chat, the conference tends to use Discord for Q/A during recorded talks.
5. Get a job using Julia! Given the explosive growth the Julia ecosystem has experienced in the last few years, it would not be unreasonable to start thinking about how you can get a job using the language. Well, you are in luck, many of the JuliaCon sponsors also hire Julia developers (many don’t even require that you have deep Julia experience since the language is so easy to learn). You can check out the job board from last year here: https://live.juliacon.org/jobs You might also want to read more about getting a job using Julia here:
Edit: My Co-author and I are thrilled to share that pre-orders our new book, Julia Crash Course, are now live:
Highlights from JuliaCon 2021 💡
JuliaCon 2021 was the largest ever Julia event in history. You can read more about the metrics for the event on the Julia Language’s Blog. Here are some of the most viewed videos from JuliaCon 2021 to give you a sense of the topics and quality:
See you there! 👀
People who have lots of conference experience often say that JuliaCon is one of the best conferences they have ever attended. And don’t just take my word for it, head to Twitter and search the #JuliaCon to see more unbiased opinions.
If you are excited for JuliaCon but don’t want to wait till July 2022, consider checking out last years materials https://juliacon.org/2021/ and also registering for SciML Con (the scientific machine learning in Julia conference) taking place in March:
