Exploring Indico: A Full Featured Event Management Platform

Summary

Managing an event is rife with inherent complexity that scales as you move from scheduling a meeting to organizing a conference. Indico is a platform built at CERN to handle their efforts to organize events such as the Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP) conference, and now it has grown to manage booking of meeting rooms. In this episode Adrian Mönnich, core developer on the Indico project, explains how it is architected to facilitate this use case, how it has evolved since its first incarnation two decades ago, and what he has learned while working on it. The Indico platform is definitely a feature rich and mature platform that is worth considering if you are responsible for organizing a conference or need a room booking system for your office.

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• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Adrian Mönnich about Indico, the effortless open-source tool for event organisation, archival and collaboration

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you start by describing what Indico is and how the project got started?
  • What are some other projects which target a similar use case and what were they lacking that led to Indico being necessary?
• Can you talk through an example workflow for setting up and managing an event in Indico?
  • How does the lifecycle change when working with larger events, such as PyCon?
• Can you describe how Indico is architected and how its design has evolved since it was first built?
  • What are some of the most complex or challenging portions of Indico to implement and maintain?
• There are a lot of areas for exercising constraint resolution algorithms. Can you talk through some of the business logic of how that operates?
• Most of Indico is highly configurable and flexible. How do you approach managing sane defaults to prevent users getting overwhelmed when onboarding?
  • What is your approach to testing given how complex the project is?
• What are some of the most interesting or unexpected ways that you have seen Indico used?
• What are some of the most interesting/unexpected lessons that you have learned in the process of building Indico?
• What do you have planned for the future of the project?

Keep In Touch

• Indico
  • Website
  • GitHub
  • IRC
• Adrian
  • ThiefMaster on GitHub

Picks

• Tobias
  • Mortal Engines movie
• Adrian
  • Virtual Reality
  • Portal VR

Links

• Indico
• Tornado
  • Podcast Interview
• CERN
• High Energy Physics
• CHEP (Computing in High Energy Physics) conference
• ZODB
• PostgreSQL
  • Data Engineering Podcast Interview
• SQLAlchemy
• Flask
• WSGI == Web Server Gateway Interface
• Mako Templates
• Jinja
• ReactJS
• Stripe
• Paypal
• Indico Introduction Video
• Reveal.js
• Mod_Python
• Zope
• Doodle
• LDAP == Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
• Daylight Saving Time
• Indico User Guide
• Py.Test
  • Podcast Episode
• Selenium
• Flask Plugin Engine
• CERN Indico Plugins
• Linux Plumber’s Conference
• Open SUSE
• F-Strings

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA