I attended JDEV 2026 in Montpellier in early June. JDEV is a French conference that regularly brings together hundreds of people working in software development for higher education and research, with around 150 participants this year.
It was a very interesting conference, with strong keynotes, talks and workshops, and a great opportunity to meet people with different roles from different institutions. Python and AI/LLM topics dominated, including a hands-on introduction to JAX and a session on PyTorch for neural network programming. One afternoon track was largely dedicated to C++, and there were also talks on Julia for scientific computing and on Rust for embedded scientific systems.
I gave a long general presentation titled “SPy 🥸 & the Python Native Interface”, with the subtitle “Will Python keep its edge in the next decade?”.
I also ran a workshop based on the SPy Web Playground, followed by local development installations. This pushed me to put a lot of work into the Playground and into SPy’s examples, which are both in much better shape now.
Overall, this was a good occasion to raise awareness of SPy within the French public research/dev community. We now have a solid general presentation of SPy and its relationship to Python , and a much better Playground - a genuinely good tool for discovering SPy.