 Sorry about that technical glitch that we had. I've changed the title of the talk, by the way, because these things are always in flux. But it's still about Prague, so. Thank you to the organisers, volunteers for being here and doing this very quickly about me. I live in the Netherlands, in Leiden, in the Netherlands. I'm actually Italian. I'm a director of engineering at Canonical, where I'm responsible for documentation practice for the company. That's me on mastodon. That's me on television. I've been involved in Django for a long time. Open source software events and conferences and so on. I'm very involved in the African-Python movement and my field of expertise is documentation as a discipline within software engineering. I'm hiring at Canonical. For all kinds of roles, community and developer relations, and I can tell you about other things, but especially for technical authors. Not technical writers, but technical authors, which is another thing. A technical author is basically a technical writer who's a programmer filled with technical curiosity. They're called technical authors because they have technical authority. If you're interested in that, come and talk to me. There's a QR code. People love those things. You can read about my vision of what a technical author is. I'm not leaving Euro-Python until I come back with some new technical authors. I'm involved in the very first DjangoCon Africa. We've extended the call for papers for that for a couple of weeks, especially so that people at Euro-Python can hear about it and have a chance. Have a look at DjangoCon Africa. Come and talk to me. DjangoCon Africa is going to be a chance to be right at the start of something amazing. I want to talk to you about Prague. Here are three really important dates in Prague's life. 1968, the Prague Spring, the brief period when the reforms under Alexander Dubcek were suddenly ended by the Soviet invasion in August of that year. Tanks rolled into these streets. The anniversary of that is next month. Then 21 years later was the so-called Velvet Revolution, when a student protest gained momentum. Over a period of two weeks in November, the regime peacefully collapsed. That was the end of Soviet era Czechoslovakia. On the last day of 1992, the Federal Republic of Czechoslovakia dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, peacefully and without violence. A very unusual thing for a nation state to do. December 1992 was also very important for me personally because it was the first time I visited Prague just a few days before that Velvet divorce. It was cold and foggy in Prague and it was snowing. In the evenings all the streets seemed empty, but the bars were full of students and cigarette smoke. They were eating sausages and pork knuckle and drinking beer. The whole thing was extremely atmospheric. In my mind I see street corners and pools of light from the lamp posts. It looked like that. That's how I remember the Charles Bridge. I remember it very clearly. I was 22 years old and I was having a tragic love affair. It's really sealed in my mind. The whole place seemed very romantic. It looked like that. I came back again for the first time in 2015 and it was August. It was boiling hot and the Charles Bridge, the same bridge, was heaving with tourists. You were really lucky if you got from one end to the other without having your eye poked out by a selfie stick. I thought, what are all these people doing on my bridge? What's really amazing to me when I look back now is that the distance between now today and 1992, 31 years, is considerably longer than that period between 1968 and 1992 when so much history happened. An empire fell and new things were created. The last few years since 1992, they just seemed like a little flash in my life. How is that possible? All those years flashed past. For human beings, cities are places and dates at the same time. Cities are dates for us. They are cornerstones in the space and time of our world. Where you are is often when you are. Cities are like software and circuits because they are all kinds of machines. They all have architectures and as machines they process signals and messages. They balance forces and they respond to demands in strongly analogous ways. They all have ports and gates and inputs and outputs. We speak of communications which happen in all of those things. Things moving around, messages, people, goods. Sometimes a signal or a message or a person gets lost or a message is sent and doesn't arrive. Or it arrives but the system doesn't know how to deal with it when it does arrive. Sometimes a mechanism, a city or a piece of software goes really wrong. Like a traffic jam or overcapacity or buffer overflow. We drop data and run out of storage. These things happen in all of those. They all use negative feedback to control their own behaviour. I don't know if anyone here has been in a riot or maybe even started a riot. That's like a positive feedback loop occurring in a city. Or if you point a microphone at the speaker and you get a howl, that's another example of positive feedback, a riot coming out of the speaker. They can all crash. Cities can fail. Software circuits can also fail. Circuits, boards look like cities if you look at them at the right angle. But they also all have messages that we can read off them if we're ready to read them. I mentioned architecture at the beginning. The architecture of cities and software and circuits, they're shaped by ideas that come from outside themselves and sometimes there are messages in that architecture. That's what I want to talk about. Cubism started with Braque and Picasso in Paris about 115 years ago and it very quickly arrived here. It had a big impact in Czech artistic circles because Prague was in many ways the cultural and intellectual capital of Europe. The Austro-Hungarian empire was this giant thing of economy and political power and military power and economic giant. But I think Prague has a reasonable claim to be the intellectual and artistic heart of that Europe. And Czech artists such as Bohmil Kubista, with a fantastic name, that's actually his name, a Cubist artist. They dived into this new language of representation or Emil Fila and I could spend you the next 25 minutes or I have a long I've got left showing you these pictures but there are plenty of museums out there and I suggest you go and see them for yourself. I love the trade fair extension of the National Gallery where you'll see some of these things. But I want to show you things that you can see in the city itself. Cubist architecture, it was mentioned this morning. It's a very unusual thing. Somehow Cubism found expression in architecture and pretty much only here in Prague or Bohemia. Apart from the Czech Cubist architectural tradition it doesn't really exist anywhere else. So we're used to seeing Cubism in plastic forms such as sculpture but not in applied arts such as architecture and there's a lot of it around. I've never seen so many prismatic buildings in my life. You know these crystalline facades. And why did it end up here? Was it just chance or one explanation I read is that Prague was already a very geometric city. I don't really buy that. Another is that it was a way to show that Prague was more exciting than Vienna or Budapest and I kind of believe that. But there was even a passion for Czech, for Cubist furniture. So between about 1910 and 1914 Cubism really was a thing and you could sit down to dinner in your Cubist apartment at your Cubist dining table with Cubist tableware and have coffee from your Cubist dinner service afterwards and there'd be probably a Cubist painting on the wall for you to admire before you went to bed in your Cubist pyjamas. It really endured here. So you can go and find out for yourselves. I can recommend the Museum of Czech Cubism in the Old Town which is where that staircase was. And if you thought that Cubist architecture seemed a bit impractical wait till you see the Cubist furniture. Sadly they don't let you sit on it. Some of it doesn't look that comfortable. What if having been born out of a charming idea it's not actually that good furniture? And you're allowed to ask such questions and I thought a lot about this problem of Cubist applied arts and what it means. I've heard Czech Cubist architecture described as a impractical or a delightful but failed experiment. And if I'm honest I don't think that seems completely unreasonable because I think that architecture has to address those kinds of questions about form and space and material and purpose. And Cubism doesn't seem to do that. Consider the Bauhaus and how it tackles those things and how the Bauhaus principles have endured in a way that Cubist architectural principles haven't. Maybe it's an idea that people fell a little bit in love with fell in love with too much because it was so charming. Maybe they were so intent on pursuing it that they lost a bit of sight of other things. And you know, I'm not an architect but in the end I think that that's the challenge of Cubism to address problems of representation and architecture isn't concerned with representation. And at this point I could imagine some Czech architect saying well thank you very much for your insights Mr Amateur architectural critic. How many iconic buildings have you built and I think the answer is so far none. And if you told me that 110 years from now somebody would be speaking at a conference and talking about my work and saying well it was a charming idea but I don't think it really works. I would take that right now. I promise you I would take that. How much in which currency would you like to be paid for me to be talked about in 110 years time? But the reason I dwell on this is not because I'm any kind of expert or have any special grasp. It's because I recognise if there are failings in that adventure because I recognise them in myself in what I do in software and other kinds of even in documentation architecture. I fall in love with the idea of abstraction and of reducing repetition. And it leads me down some funny holes every single time. I'm a little bit embarrassed by how easily I'm seduced by that idea. So eventually I dig myself out of those holes a little bit sadder and clearly not much wiser. And the reason that those cubist buildings spoke to me was they sent, they were like a message to me about the mistakes I made. And that's why they really resonate with me and I thought so much about them. I'd love to hear if somebody else sees those buildings and has a similar kind of response because these have messages if we're ready to hear them. Sometimes we even understand the messages. I said cubism was really important here. Yosef Chapec became one of the foremost cubist artists. Plenty of his material in museums, I think it's wonderful. Even if you've never heard of him, you owe him something because he's the person who coined the word robot. That's his portrait titled Mr Myself. But he was a brother of Carell Chapec who actually introduced the word to us. There's a programming language named after him. Rossum's Universal Robots is a play about artificial life and intelligence. It's a very sophisticated inquiry into its implications about the way transformative technologies sometimes stop serving us and make demands of us instead. It's quite sophisticated about knowledge and who owns knowledge. That seems like it has some warnings for us right now because we're dealing with questions of artificial intelligence and the knowledge that it holds. So maybe that's a message that has something to say. I first encountered him on my visit to Prague all those years ago. The War with Newts is another prescient science fiction parable about humanity's self-destructing impulses about how we feed our own galloping greed. I'll tell you about the story which is funny and sad and frightening and so on. I wasn't aware of a climate crisis I don't think in 1992. But when I read this again more recently I realized that he predicted exactly how we would behave in a climate crisis. It's a book about now written nearly 100 years ago and the book ends in Prague on the river and without spoiling anything what's in the river is what should be in the sea because of us and maybe that spells the end because it's like now where the seas are rising up and things that should be in one place are in another like the weather. So there's the message. Maybe we've got that message. Last year I was in Prague for work I spent hours walking around the city by myself. I discovered a memorial to the brothers that I found very moving in Namestimiru and I love discovering things like that in cities just by walking around because you look up and there's the architecture. You look around you, you find a memorial and you walk around and look down and you'll see another kind of memorial right at your feet because all over the city outside an ordinary house on an ordinary street you'll see a small brass plaque set into the ground with a name on it and some dates, a Jewish name and somebody lived there. Here's one. It says, Peter Gins lived here. Born in 1928, taken to Terezin which was a concentration camp in 1942 killed in Auschwitz and we don't know when he died. He was 14 when they came from him. So there in the ground is a message from the city stamped into a brass square a message about what happens in ordinary streets to 14-year-old boys or what can be allowed to happen. So what's the next step? There's the message. We've read the message. Do we understand it? Do we need to act on it? And here's Carell because as well as being a writer of plays and books and messages to the future he was a political activist and anti-Nazi, anti-fascist and anti-militarist. He was already named public enemy number two by the Nazis before Czechoslovakia fell in the war and he knew what was coming but he refused to leave. And so he was one of the first people they came for and he foiled them those stupid bastards. They didn't find him. He had the last laugh because he was already dead. So maybe it was a bitter laugh because he was only 48 when he died he was in very poor health. And his brother Yosef was also an outspoken anti-Nazi an artist, a journalist who responded sharply to things like the rise of Hitler the Spanish Civil War, the Munich Agreement. He was arrested by the Nazis here in Prague not long after the occupation began and even in the concentration camps he managed to keep writing, he produced translations poetry sketches and drawings in secret he managed to write poetry in a concentration camp and he survived for more than five years and finally he died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen and we don't know the exact date. So Carell and his wife they're buried about ten minutes walk away in Viserad cemetery but for Yosef there's only a stone and it says here Yosef Chaffek painter and poet would have been buried grave far away. So they Carell and Yosef they were brave and true and they spent years of their lives desperately transmitting messages into the future and here we are 18, 90, 100 years later and we're still admiring those pictures and reading their words and right now you can walk into a museum and see them and into a bookshop to buy a book and I recommend it but it's not enough because what should you do with an urgent message? You put it up politely on the wall of a museum or let it live quietly on a bookshelf imagine we could send a message back in time to them, we could say, you know, guess what you want your words and pictures, they haven't merely survived they're still alive right here in our culture and your names are alive, we remember you you defeated those stupid and death filled Nazis with your imagination, intelligence and truth so guess what almost every person on the planet knows the word that you invented the name that you invented, the robots you gave the name to entire industries and disciplines and now we've had to invent new philosophies to deal with the problems of that and we could say you're still ahead of us in several ways and maybe it looks like the world is going to be engulfed in a catastrophe of its own making but at least there are some of us who receive those messages some even understood them and possibly some are acting on them so I chose those brothers for this talk because I do love them because there's this connection of the human spirit between them and us between our time and their time but every city is filled with messages like that maybe personal ones like about our failings as an architect of software and documentation I don't take that personally or maybe they're about bigger things than that but there's so much in a city that if you look for the messages you will find them of beauty and sadness everywhere you look just by walking and looking around and then you have to understand the message and act on them and it's up to us to do that so thank you very much for listening to me Is it time for some questions? I've got five minutes for questions I would love to hear some questions so... If you have any questions there are microphones in the middle of the room please come forward or on the Discord channel for the people watching us live Just as a reminder but please I'm really interested to hear questions or your thoughts on this and sorry about the glitch earlier I had to rush a little bit but I think we got there in the end Could you give us another example of a message you got from a city that you think is profound? Well you know Prague for those personal reasons already had quite an effect on me so I felt I was looking for things and now you've put... I'll think of something as soon as we leave the room I know I will I might think of something in a minute that's the way I think it's really interesting to think about I talked earlier about how cities process things and I was looking from the terrace and seeing the traffic jam on the bridge and you can go places and look at your own city and see where is my city not working where is the waste and uselessness and inefficiency in this and then think oh yeah I know something else that looks a bit like this and it's in that python that I was writing the other day and I think roads are a good example of that and another example is the way you know how people build roads to try and reduce congestion and then immediately the roads get filled up with more congestion and we do that in software all the time I think that would be an example of a message not from a particular city but you see it all around the resources that we're given we'll just do exactly the same thing as when we had fewer resources Thanks Thank you very much for the presentation as always I perceive that we're getting as humanity but tech people in particular are very clear and strong message about the dangers of artificial intelligence and also the dangers of letting the climate go loose Do you think we're still at the stage of understanding the message or we're already acting on those messages but we're a little bit too late and how do you feel about that? I think most people understand the messages and I think the acting part is where we're really failing right now and the failure is the failure of our governments because they are the only ones that have the power to put the finger on the scale and change things I'll save the planet by reusing my conference lanyard for the next conference but legislation is what's going to make the difference here Governments that grow spines and actually do things that change behaviour and that is the only way out Corporations are not going to do it even if they would like even if they are sustainable responsible corporations you just need one factory or one mine in the former Soviet Union that is pumping out more pollution than the whole of Scandinavia to realise that only governments can solve this So you put these dates on a scale now which is the next date where you would like to look back like 2068 or 2089 is there something like this that have you talked about that? So another moment to look back sometimes we're really lucky so if you were here in 1989 when the government fell or possibly somebody here was here in 1968 although I doubt it I bet that date would be seared on your memory so some of those things were lucky other things it's only when we look back that we realised that we didn't realise it but that was the day those were the days when it was happening and will ask me in 10 years time maybe 2023 will be the time when something turned around the corner there are cataclysms like the attack on the will the trade centre and so on the tsunami if you remember that the great Indian Ocean these things stick with us I don't know maybe a Czech person who is more sensitive and understanding of what's going on right now will have some ideas about what those dates might be