I’m going to participate to PyData Paris 2025 to present the project py-edu-fr .
Title
Sharing computational course material at larger scale: a French multi-tenant attempt
Abstract
With the rise of computation and data as pillars of science, institutions are struggling to provide large-scale training to their students and staff. Often, this leads to redundant, fragmented efforts, with each organization producing its own bespoke training material. In this talk, we report on a collaborative multi-tenant initiative to produce a shared corpus of interactive training resources in the Python language, designed as a digital common that can be adapted to diverse contexts and formats in French higher education and beyond. Description
Description
Despite continuous efforts like Unisciel or FUN MOOC, training material reuse remains very limited in French higher education. To some extent, this is cultural with curricula that are not standardized across universities and the absence of a textbook tradition. Beyond intellectual property, language, and cultural barriers, instructors need or want to adapt the training material to the split in teaching units, the audience, the format, and pedagogical choices. Computational training materials pose unique challenges as they require adapting to various technological choices or constraints including programming language, computational libraries, computing environments, and infrastructure. Also they needs to be continuously maintained to adapt to the evolving technology which is incompatible with reuse patterns such as “copy-and-forget”.
We describe the team’s use cases (from undergraduate to lifelong teaching, computer science students to non specialists, intensive week-long workshops to unsupervised), the sources of inspiration and reuse (MOOC’s, Software Carpentry, …), the current status and content (introductory programming, …, development tools, and best practices), the computational environment and authoring tools (Jupyter, MyST, Jupyter-Book, version control, software forge, and CI) and explore some levers to facilitate sharing and reuse (modularity, gamification and decontextualisation, portability, adaptive learning, machine assisted multilingual authoring).
This talk is intended for instructors, students, potential contributors, and anyone interested in computational and scientific software engineering education.
Unsuccessful submission for a presentation about Mercurial
I think it would also make sense to be able to talk about Mercurial so I submitted an abstract which unfortunately has not been accepted.
Title
Nicer version control with software diversity and Mercurial
Abstract
Effective use of modern version control systems is crucial for both individual developers and collaborative projects. However, despite the availability of user-friendly platforms like GitHub, many users struggle to leverage the full potential of version control, often utilizing only a fraction of its capabilities.
Mercurial
, a distributed version control system similar
to Git (same generation and similar principles), offers a unique perspective due to its
distinct history and development. Mercurial started with a clear focus on providing a
user-friendly and safe interface. As a mature and extensive Python application with C and
Rust extensions, Mercurial provides robust extensibility. This led to its wide adoption
in the industry by companies of all sizes and to many interesting improvements and
experiments, particularly in terms of performance with very large repositories and user
experience, leading for example to the
absorb
command.
In this talk, we will explore how version control can be enhanced by examining the user experience with Mercurial. We will present the current state of Mercurial in 2025, highlighting how its modern features enable users to easily and safely benefit from collaborative history editing during code reviews.
Description
Is a monopoly or diversity better for open-source software? This complex question requires a nuanced answer. While the success of GitHub (and later GitLab) has led to Git’s dominance in the open-source landscape, this de facto monopoly has both advantages and disadvantages, notably limiting innovation and constraining workflows and usages.
Recently, astute observers have noticed signs that Git may not be the final chapter in version control history. New tools, Pijul, Jujutsu and Sapling, have emerged, and a modern development platform called Heptapod (a GitLab fork) is now fully compatible with both Git and Mercurial.
Multiple of Mercurial features have been inherited or reused by Sapling or Jujutsu. However its most compelling feature is still unique to Mercurial: the ability to make distributed history rewriting safer and more accessible. We will explore how this feature can benefit open-source projects and argue for the importance of diversity in version control tooling.