Ahoy’hoy, again. Here’s my quick round up of day two of Kiwi PyCon. Here are the talks I attended:

• Keynote: “Creating Pythonic APIs” by Anthony Baxter, from Google. This was really well put together, informative and above all hilarious.
• “How Python is influencing Neuroscience Research” by Daniel Myall. Again good to see python being used for hardcore sciencey stuff!
• “Don’t Block the GUI” by Glenn Ramsey. An introduction to basic threading and futures, I knew most of this stuff, but it was still interesting.
• “Python in the Datacentre” by Matt Provost, from Weta Digital. Interesting to see the internals of how Python loads, it probably explains why Python is slow on embedded systems too.
• “Wikkid Design” by Tim Penhey. About the design of a distributed Wiki system for Launchpad. Some good take home messages around choosing modules (personal recommendation and good documentation rule!).
• Open Spaces (Track 1): “Why aren’t we using Python 3″, “NoSQL Databases” and “Robotics and UAVs”.
• “Demystifying Unicode” by Leon Matthews. I knew nothing about unicode before this, now I know how to use it and that I should be using it!
• “Teaching Computer Science with Python” by Carl Cerecke. An interesting look into the Canterbury CS Department’s moves towards Python for teaching.

That’s it for now, there will be more in my full round up, which I’ll write when I have time (sometime this week). Bye for now!

Ahoy’hoy, again. Here’s my quick round up of day two of Kiwi PyCon. Here are the talks I attended: Keynote: “Creating Pythonic APIs” by Anthony Baxter, from Google. This was...

So I said I’d try to blog about Kiwi PyCon over the weekend, so here goes! This is just going to be a quick post going through a few highlights, I’ll save my detailed discussion for my full round up when I get back home.

So here’s the talks I attended:

• Keynote (obviously) – “How I learned to stop worrying and love deployment” by Jacob Kaplan-Moss (a core Django developer). This turned me onto a few modules, which I need to take a look at some point.
• “Freeing the Cloud one (small) service at a time” by Francois Marier – about free web services and his service, Libravatar, in particular (Francois was also kind enough to help me out with a problem I was having with it right there and then, thanks Francois).
• “Building a distributed Key-Value store with Cassandra” by Aaron Morton from Weta Digital. This was interesting, though I think a lot of it went over my head!
• “Packaging and Virtual Environments” by Brett Wilkins (and another presenter, who’s name I can’t remember – so sorry to him!). This was really good and turned me onto distribute, which is a setuptools replacement. I love the image on their website:

• Lightning talks – Of which the one on Bottle was particularly interesting – I’ve been looking for a lightweight web framework to play around with, so I’ll give it a try.
• “5 Good Reasons for Automated Testing” by Roman Joost. Yeah, I really should be using automated testing!
• “An Opinionated Guide to what makes a Good Unit Test” by Michael Hudson Doyle. Reinforced the opinion expressed above!
• “Amazon Web Service: An Introduction” by Simone Brunozzi. This was quite businessy, but this stuff is definitely on my “must check out” list.
• “Python In Astronomy” by Ian Bond. I missed the beginning of this but it’s awesome to see Python being used to do some hardcore science – finding planets no less!

Well that’s my quick summary of day one, hopefully there’ll be more good stuff tomorrow, so I’ll ‘see’ you then.

So I said I’d try to blog about Kiwi PyCon over the weekend, so here goes! This is just going to be a quick post going through a few highlights,...