Indico: the 20 year history and evolution of an open-source project at CERN

Indico is a powerful open-source event management toolkit, created at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), that has been evolving over the last 20+ years. Indico has been used to host major conferences, including EuroPython itself in 2006 and 2007, as well as thousands of events at CERN, and other major international organizations/institutions alike.

Maintaining an ever-evolving project comes with unique challenges: dealing with legacy code, adopting new technologies, and managing technical debt without disrupting a large and continuously growing user base.

This talk explores the project’s technical evolution as well as focusing on how it stayed current with emerging technologies; starting as a PHP/MySQL app, it transitioned to mod_python with ZODB, briefly used a custom WSGI implementation, and ultimately became a modern Flask/Postgres/React application - sometimes integrating multiple technologies simultaneously.

By the end of this talk, attendees will:

• Understand the challenges of maintaining a long-lived web application.
• Learn strategies for dealing with technical debt while keeping systems evolving.
• Gain insights into real-world architectural decisions for open-source projects.

Join us, as two team members discuss how to stay sane with the meticulous balancing act of dealing with both technical debt and integrating new technologies/features.