PyCon US 2013 Wrap Up

I just got back from my first PyCon!

There were a lot of familiar faces. Which is quite an achievement for an introvert like myself. I finally got to meet people in the Python community as far away as Austin, TX. While finding people was easy in a crowd of 2,500, finding food was not. Luckily, we were too late to get the official hotel, and were housed in a hotel a mile down the road which forced us to walk past a great strip mall full of good food. If it’s there’s one thing I’ve learned about conferences in general, it’s that it’s always worth it to strike out on your own to find good food. In NICAR, it was Hammerheads in Louisville. For PyCon, it was finding Bistro Siam. So onto some Python.

Talks I went to I liked (in roughly chronological order):

• Sauce Labs’s Integrating Selenium and Sauce Labs into your Continuous Integration Build (description)
• The Naming of Ducks: Where Dynamic Types Meet Smart Conventions Brandon Rhodes
• API Design for Library Authors Chris McDonough
• Measuring and modeling the complexity of children’s books Jeff Elmore
• Introduction to SQLAlchemy Mike Bayer
• Elasticsearch (Part 1): Indexing and Querying Erik Rose
• ApplePy: An Apple ][ emulator in Python James Tauber
• Logical Failures Luke Sneeringer
• Let Them Configure! Łukasz Langa
• Porting Django apps to Python 3 Jacob Kaplan-Moss
• Dynamic Code Patterns: Extending Your Applications with Plugins Doug Hellmann

Videos I look forward to watching:

• Composability Through Multiple Inheritance Łukasz Langa
• How to Except When You’re Excepting Esther Nam
• This Old Video Site: How PBS streams video – and you can too! Edgar Roman
• Python Profiling Amjith Ramanujam
• The Guts of Unicode in Python Benjamin Peterson
• Blame it on Caesar: What you need to know about dates, times and time zones Lennart Regebro
• Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python Raymond Hettinger
• SimpleCV – Computer Vision using Python Katherine Scott
• The Magic of Metaprogramming Jeff Rush
• Boundaries Gary Bernhardt
• Python at Netflix Jeremy Edberg, Corey Bertram, Roy Rapoport
• How Import Works Brett Cannon
• Going beyond the Django ORM limitations with Postgres Craig Kerstiens
• Namespaces in Python Eric Snow

Posters from the Poster Session I particularly liked:

• Collecting & Analyzing Financial Data Alex Xu. I liked the idea that there’s a movement to make historical data easier to get.
• Responsive Web Apps with Unreliable HTTP Requests Inside the Request/Response Cycle Michael Newman. So requests has neat timeout and retry features I’ve never taken advantage of before.
• Reverse Engineering the Internet of Things Issac Kelly. Making a Python api for closed api home automation devices.
• Serpint – Controlling Raspberry Pi GPIO with a Serial Port/Socket Louis Goessling. A serial port emulator for Raspberry pi.
• Soundscape from Ocean Color Satellite Data Luiz Irber, Arnaldo Russo. 12 years of ocean data “visualized” using sound. there’s more to presenting data than with graphics.

And of course… the surprise guest star of PyCon this year was the Raspberry Pi. I look forward to playing with it (once I find time!).

Hopefully, I’ll come back and expand what I got especially liked about the talks I highlighted as I re-watch the videos. You can keep an eye on http://pyvideo.org/category/33/pycon-us-2013 with me as they release videos.