Snapcraft at Europython 2018

In July, several members of our advocacy and design teams went to Europython 2018 in Edinburgh. It was a really well-organised event, mixing great speakers from a vibrant community at a great location.

The main reason for us to get closer to the Python developer community was to promote Snapcraft as the best way to publish on Linux, for app developers in general, and for Python developers in particular. As well as increasing awareness of Snapcraft, we gained a deeper understanding of the needs of Python developers and made contact with interesting products and engineers.

The power of the Snapcraft brand

To start our conversations we brought some Snapcraft swag, stickers and t-shirts, which worked really well with many positive responses. Some people even came directly to our booth to just get a t-shirt, because the Snapcraft logo looked great. Kudos to our brand team!

Surrounded by snap publishers

It was great to see displays from companies that have already released software as snaps: Microsoft who recently released PowerShell, and JetBrains who were promoting their PyCharm Community, Edu and Pro products, available as snaps like all their other apps. This helped us to point out real use cases when talking with people, explaining what the product was about and how it could help them.

What’s next?

While explaining snaps and answering questions from developers, we got valuable feedback on how to make the platform better for Python developers specifically. The main questions we were asked at Europython are very much in line with the type of questions we get from publishers, for example:

• What is snapcraft and how does it help me distribute on Linux?
• How does snapcraft differ from other packaging solutions?
• Will snapcraft work on my Linux distribution?
• What software can you package using snapcraft?
• Is snapcraft free to use? Who builds snapcraft?

Answering these questions will help to clarify snapcraft’s positioning, establish the correct tone of voice and language to use on the site.

We’re looking forward to attending more events like this, where we can establish connections with different communities, improve our products and services and inform our product development roadmap.

You can use snapcraft to make your software available for millions of Linux users across multiple distributions. Happy snapping!