PyCon - Day 5 (Sprints Day 1)

Today was the first time I've ever sprinted, and I can honestly say it wasn't at all what I expected. I was expecting frantic energy, and I mistakenly assumed that the project maintainers would turn up with a huge number of tickets that would get allocated to anyone who came. I also hoped (expected?) that there would be someone experienced in the project who would help me get started.

Instead it was a cross between a design meeting and a pretty regular work day, and while everyone was friendly and very helpful, they were also busy trying to get their own work done.

It's no-ones fault - I just wasn't anywhere near prepared enough to actually be useful helping on the project that I wanted to work on. In part, I guess that some of that is about trying to break into a community - there needs to be a degree of trust before you get commit rights to a major repository. So I'm happy to watch most of this one out, with the understanding that things will go better at future conferences.

Instead, I've had a good day working on a related topic to my project of interest, which I'm hoping may end up with nice enough results to put in for a PyCon AU talk.

We'll see how it goes.

PyCon - Day 3 (Conference Day 1)

Today was a very big day, and to be honest I'm feeling a little wrung-out tonight. Because this was the first full day of the conference we got swag this morning, which had more than enough cool stuff in it to make me very happy.

The keynotes were great (yeah for awesome dancing robots on stage!), as was seeing the 2200+ people in the Grand Ballroom.

The first keynote speaker Stormy Peters' messages on community building, inclusiveness, and on building tools that enable end-users to make and control their data in the ways that they want and need to made lots of sense.

I've followed the second keynote speaker Paul Graham's work for a long time - he's a big part of the reason that I do things the way I do in python, and for my interest in Lisp and functional programming techniques. To hear him speak about Y-Combinator was an honour. The message that I took away from the keynote was that big things can grow out of small ideas, and that we, as developers, really already know what the important problems are.

During the talks I didn't follow a particular track, but rather tried to concentrate on maths and sciences talks that I knew relate strongly to the things that I work on, or could work on in the future (graph-processing, machine-learning, Py0MQ, Sage & Pandas), but I also went to Raymond Hettinger's talk on subclassing, and Dave Brondsema's talk on decorators and context managers.

I managed about five minutes in the exhibitors hall, and grabbed some great deals from the O'Reilley store at what ended up being about a third of the price of the same books off the shelf in Australia.

I also popped in on the end Testing In Python miniconf/open space session, which was an insane combination of informative, hilarious and a bit wrong (lab coats, beer and goat jokes). But the 100 people in the room were a testament to the dedication of the attendees on a Friday night at 9pm when there were at least two different parties running with free beer.

Update

Matt Spitz's talk on practical machine learning had a number of good code samples, you can find his git repository on machine learning from baseball stats on github, and his slides at slideshare.

The talk on Sage including a link to an sagenb.com which hosts an online version of the Sage math notebook for experimentation and sharing with your peers.

Wes McKinney's slides on the VBench and the Panda's data manipulation and transformation library are available on slideshare, and his code is available from github

PyCon - Day 0

I've arrived safely in Santa Clara, The city itself is amazing. From a nerdy perspective, it was awesome because it was almost like the internet coming alive. I saw buildings for Yahoo, Mcaffee, some big game development studios and more. It's very obviously a technology focused city. Even all the advertising is for software and software related services.

It's also very clean. It reminds me alot of Canberra (without the round-abouts). Very flat, with perfect footpaths and manicured grass edges.

I got back to the hotel and caught up with one of the other Australians I knew was coming, very nice to see a familiar face after a long day. I stopped and had a late lunch with him and another delegate. I don't think I'm spilling anything big, but the news is that the total numbers have crept over 2000 for the conference, with over 1900 registrations for delegates.

Wi-fi isn't working in my room at the moment, so I've had a quick nap, I'm posting this down in the lobby on the conference network, so I'm using that. In the time from late lunch to dinner time, the hotel lobby itself has gone from being filled with 'suits' to being filled with pythonistas.

PyCon 2012

If anyone is interested, I'm attending US PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara.

Post a comment if you're interested in catching up!