The Mouse Vs. The Python

I only attended one of the two talks in the last session of the day. It was presented by Ms. Leigh Honeywell and called Think Globally, Hack Locally – Teaching Python in Your Community.

She started “Python Newbie Night” in Toronto, Canada. It was an informal, peer-taught class which often put code up on the wall with a projector. They would work through the Python book, “How to Think Like a Computer Scientist” which has chapter exercises (the book is online for free at http://thinkpython.com). She was in a hackerspace (her local one was hacklab.co) and seemed to recommend them. She gave a list of venues for teaching programming such as Community centres, churches, retirement homes, schools, jails and more. She also mentioned that the University of Toronto has switched to teaching Python from Java (I think).

She spoke on what worked for these classes and what didn’t work so well. For the most part, the talk was just general purpose tips for teaching Python. I do most of the stuff that she talks about for Pyowa (local python users group) and completely agree that doing it alone sucks. I also agree that teaching others about Python can be very rewarding. I thought this was a nice informal talk that would be informative to people who have never done this before. If you plan to start a user’s group, watching her talk or reading her slides would be a step in the right direction.

I managed to make it to three talks in the middle session. Here’s the list: “508 and You: Taking the Pain out of Accessibility” with Katie Cunningham, “Actors: What, Why, and How” with Donovan Preston and “Python Metaprogramming” with Nicolas Lara. I’ll see you after the jump! (more…)

For the morning session, I went to “Decorators From Basics to Class Decorators to Decorator Libraries” and “Interfaces, Adapters and Factories”, which were in the first and second sections. I skipped all the middle talks as I just didn’t see anything that I thought sounded interesting. Unfortunately, Open Space was almost completely under-utilized during the morning and afternoon, so there wasn’t really anything to do. Anyway, on to my thoughts about the two talks I dd get to see. (more…)

After the technical difficulties that ended the Lightning talks this morning, Van Lindberg got up and stalled for time while they got it fixed so he could introduce the first plenary. He did a really good job and let us know that this PyCon had set two records: First, it has the largest attendance ever with approx. 1025 people. Secondly, around 10-11% were women. Very cool! (more…)

On Saturday morning, PyCon hosted some Lightning Talks for about half an hour. Here are the topics and authors (when I caught their names):

Joseph Tate – A web anti-pattern

Securing Python Package Management – Justin Samuel

The State of Crypto in Python – Geremy Condra

Haystack for Django, has custom search, includes tests and docs. Install Solr/Whoose/Xapian, then install Haystack www.haystacksearch.org

Contribute to Twisted – a plea to get people involved in Twisted dev

There was another guy who presented without slides as he or the Twisted guy managed to blow a fuse that caused the projectors to malfunction or something. I’ve already forgotten what he presented on. I thought the Haystack one was the most interesting as it engaged me the most. The others were interesting in there own way, but most of those talks needed more than 5-10 minutes to truly flush out their topics.

The third session only was only two talks long. I decided to check out Ecommerce in Python: Introduction to Satchmo and GetPaid (#144) by Christopher Johnson and Chris Moffett. My primary reason for attending this talk is because I’ve thought that opening an online store sounds really interesting and I might be able to use the information at work since we have been doing a fair amount of online payments for various services.

Satchmo was born because a bunch of guys had girlfriends or wives who wanted to start a business. He mentioned Toys R Us Australia is using Satchmo as one of the largest companies using Satchmo, which is cool to know. Satchmo is a Django “plugin”. He said that it’s just normal Django code and over a hundred templates. The only example he showed was a screenshot that was extremely simplistic.

The GetPaid project started with a BBQ Sprint. Moffett isn’t a programmer, but more the organizer behind the project and raised support for it. GetPaid is for Plone / Zope3. Both projects are “easy to use”, “flexible” and “easy to extend”. Oddly enough, I wasn’t engaged with either of the presenters. Admittedly, I was distracted by an inane discussion on the #pycon IRC channel about the abstractness of Alex Martelli’s talk.

I had a hard time picking a second talk as there were several that I thought looked interesting. I ended up going to How Are Large Applications Embedding Python? by Peter Shinners. He seemed to be in the film or gaming industry, so he focused on software from that group that was embedding Python in their programs. The examples he covered were Maya, Nuke, Houdini and Blender. I’ve been interested in computer animation and film for a long time, but I had only heard of the first and the last of these programs. Mr. Shinners focused on how Python was embedded in each as well as their differences and similarities.  While interesting, the differences appeared to be pretty subtle to me.

Overall, this was a decent session. I learned some new things and that’s always a plus!