The Long Awaited Kiwi Pycon Round-Up

OK, so this isn’t going to be as large a round up as I envisaged. Principally because its been so long since the actual event and also because only one talk video is currently available – I guess all that video editing is a big job! Also, I haven’t really had the time to investigate much of the stuff I learned about over that weekend as my current Python programming is limited to the odd script here and there (most of my programming is sadly limited to C++ and Java for reasons out of my control).

Anyway, it just so happens that the video that is up is from probably the best talk of the weekend, Anthony Baxter’s ‘Pythonic APIs’. This talk made me laugh from start to finish and taught me some things I didn’t know, watch the video below if you’re interested (brought to you by the magic of HTML5!).

As far as the other videos go, I’ve subscribed to the Kiwi Pycon Blip.tv RSS feed so I’ll be able to share them as they come along.

All that remains is to talk about my overall impressions of the conference, before they completely fade from memory! Basically I really enjoyed myself, everything was very well organised and the venue was excellent. There seemed to be some rumbling that Waitangi was a bit far away from everywhere and that the conference should have been in a city. For me the location was actually a bonus as it meant I had a good excuse to take the following day off and have a bit of a holiday!

So that’s about it, thanks to Danny, Guy, Tim and everyone else who organised. I had a great time and I even won a prize. I’m just sorry this post has taken me so long to get around to writing. Maybe I’ll be quicker off the mark next year!

Kiwi PyCon Day Two

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!

Kiwi PyCon Day One…

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.

Going to Kiwi PyCon

Kiwi Pycon Banner

As some of you may (or may not) know, I’m heading to Kiwi Pycon this weekend. There are some interesting topics on the schedule and I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll actually be my first Open Source conference so I’m not quite sure what to expect.

I’m going to try and blog some stuff over the weekend, but I’m also not sure how much time I’ll have, I will definitely be posting to Identi.ca though, so keep an eye on things there if you’re interested. I’m also going to do a full write up after the event, so stay tuned for that.

That’s pretty much it for now, bye!