(Originally post: https://blog.europython.eu/20th-anniversary-of-europython/)

This year's conference will mark the 20th edition of the EuroPython conference.

Since we started touring Europe in 2002 in Charleroi, Belgium, we have come a long way. The conference has grown from the initial 240 to around 1200-1400 attendees every year. The organization had started with a small group of people in a somewhat ad-hoc way and has now grown into a well structured team backed by the non-profit EuroPython Society (EPS), while still keeping the fun spirit of the early days.

EuroPython 2002 was the first major all volunteer run event for Python. A lot of other conferences have since emerged in Europe and we're actively trying to help them wherever we can, with our grants program, growing conference knowledge base and our Organizers' Lunch, for which we regularly invite representatives of all European Python conferences to get together to network, exchange experience in organizing events community building and understand how we can most effectively help each other.

To celebrate the anniversary, we took a deep look into our archives and have put together live website copies of the last few years, going back all the way to EP2009, which was held in Birmingham, UK. For previous years, archive.org stored some pages of the websites, so let's do a quick tour of 20 years of EuroPython: