2025-07-17 –, South Hall 2B
Internal technical communities have become a cornerstone of how Bloomberg fosters engineering excellence, cross-team collaboration, and sustained innovation. These grassroots groups shape best practices, address shared challenges, and enable engineers to develop beyond their daily roles, directly influencing the company’s technological growth and culture.
In this talk, we’ll explore one of our firm's most established internal communities: Bloomberg's Python Guild. Active for more than a decade, the Guild has grown into a thriving, organisation-wide network supporting thousands of Python developers. It not only advances internal excellence but also actively contributes to the broader Python ecosystem through open source projects, sponsorship of major conferences, and collaboration with nonprofit organisations.
We'll share practical insights into how such internal communities are structured, discuss their measurable impact, and provide guidance on building and sustaining communities that drive meaningful innovation.
Whether you're thinking about starting an internal community in your company or looking for fresh ideas to nurture and expand an existing one, this talk will provide plenty of inspiration and guidance.
Beginner
Olga Matoula is a Senior Software Engineer in the Instant Bloomberg (IB) Integrations - Chatbots engineering team at Bloomberg. She is a leader of the company's Python Guild, an internal community of Python enthusiasts. She previously held other roles at Bloomberg and Microsoft, and co-founded Code It Like a Girl, a social enterprise teaching coding skills to women. In her free time, Olga enjoys reading, yoga, and exploring London's music scene.
Luca Ferocino is a Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, where he specializes in cloud infrastructure, with a focus on Kubernetes-based microservices platforms and cloud-native applications. With a robust data engineering background, he has shaped strategies and implemented solutions for onboarding complex financial data to the firm, tackling intricate business challenges across various asset classes and organizational domains.
Passionate about community engagement, Luca is an active co-lead of Bloomberg's Python Guild. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing, as well as the company's active participation in and sponsorship of Python conferences globally.
Luca earned master's and bachelor's degrees in quantitative economics from Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy.