Phew, tiring trip to PyCon this year. This was my second year after hitting up my first last year. The conference definitely felt larger than last year as they crossed 2,200 attendees. It’s unbelievable to see how large the Python community has gotten. I can’t stress what great job the people that put this together.
Last year I hardly knew anyone. This year, however, I got to put faces to people I’ve interacted with over the last year, welcome back those I met last year, and get some face to face time with new co-workers from Canonical. The social aspect was a larger chunk of my time this year for sure.
Side note, I listen to The Changelog podcast from time to time, and I love their question on who you’d love to pair up/hack with as a programming hero type question. I got to meet and greet mine at this PyCon by meeting up with Mike Bayer. He’s behind some great tools like SqlAlchemy and Mako. What I love is that, not only does he rock the code part, but the community part as well. I’m always amazed to see the time he puts into his responses to questions and support avenues. Highlight of my PyCon for sure.
I’ll post a seperate blog post on my sprint notes. I feel that if you’re going to go, you might as well stay for sprints. I get as much out of that as the conference parts itself. I think I made some good progress on things for Bookie this year. The big thing is that an invite system is in place, so if you’d like an account on Bmark.us let me know and I’ll toss an invite your way.
Notes
- Introduction to Metaclasses
- Basic but reminded me how the bits worked and had some good examples. I like this because I often write ‘the code I want to be writing’ and then write my modules/etc to fit and metaclasses help with this sometimes.
- Fast Test, Slow Test
- Just a reminder that fast tests are true unit tests and run during dev which helps make things easier/faster as you go vs the whole ‘mad code’ then wait for feedback on how wrong you are.
- Practical Machine Learning in Python
- mloss.org – check out for lots of notes/etc on ML in OSS
- ml-class.org – teach me some ML please
- sluggerml – app he built as a ML demo
- scikit-learn : lots of potential, very active right now
- Introduction to PDB
- whoa…where have you been all my life ‘until’ command?
- use ‘where’ more to move up stack vs adding more debug lines
- Flexing SQLAlchemy’s Relational Power
- Hand Coded Applications with SQLAlchemy
- ❤ SqlAchemy. Some really good examples of writing less code by automating the biolerplate with conventions.
- Web Server Bottlenecks And Performance Tuning
- lesson: if you think it’s apache’s fault think again. You’re probably doing it wrong.
- Advanced Celery
- check out cyme https://github.com/celery/cyme, possible way to more easily run/distribute celery work?
- cool to see implementations of map/reduce using celery
- chords and groups are good, check them out more
- Building A Python-Based Search Engine
- Good talk for into into terms and such for fulltext search
- Lighting talks of note
- py3 porting docs: http://docs.python.org/howto/pyporting
- bpython rewind feature is full of win over ipython
- ‘new virtualenv’ trying to get into stdlib for py3.3, cool!
- asyncdynamo cool example of async boto requests for high performance working with AWS api (uses tornado)
- I WANT the concurrent.features library…but it’s Python 3 😦
Tech Rantings from a Michigan Techie 