PyCon 2017 - Digest, Impressions, Reflection

PyCon 2017 was such a great conference, I made so many good connections, got to see many good things the community is working on. It was very inspiring.

In this article I will summarize some highlights and link to other resources.

Networking

The best thing you can do at a conference.

In that context the best lesson I think came from @AlSweigart:

… skip all the talks – conference is primarily about meeting new people.

All the talks are up and you can watch them at your own pace, the in-person networking could only be done during these days though so I am happy I did plenty of that 🙂

Ideas, ideas, ideas. The expo hall was filled with companies and interesting people. I spoke with various companies and great software developers, I met with Dan Bader, Mike Kennedy, Brian Okken, Anthony Shaw, Trey Hunner, and many more, which gave me a lot of inspiration.

Talks / workshops

The keynotes were fantastic, from Kelsey Hightower’s Ok Google, talk to Kubernetes to Jake’s Why is Python such an effective tool in science:

Why don’t you use C instead of Python? It’s so much faster

Why don’t you commute by plane instead of car? It’s so much faster.

Again all the talks are on YouTube and they are packed with good info. Some that I attended and enjoyed:
- Amjith Ramanujam – Awesome Command Line Tools: this was a great talk which taught me a lot of new tools to make your CLI apps more user-focused.
- Raymond Hettinger – Modern Python Dictionaries A confluence of a dozen great ideas. As all talks by Raymond, highly informative and entertaining. More dicts: Brandon Rhodes – The Dictionary Even Mightier
- Dave Forgac – Share Your Code! Python Packaging Without Complication – useful / practical talk, makes me want to try cookiecutter and write an article about it.
- Sep Dehpour – Magic Method, on the wall, who, now, is the fairest one of all – this was a fun talk showing what you can do with dunder methods and some things you probably should not do 😉
- Chalmer Lowe – bokeh: Data Visualization in Python (workshop) – I will definitely use Bokeh next time I need to do some data visualization, this workshop gave me all the basics to get started.
- Ben Zaitlen, Matthew Rocklin, Min Ragan Kelley, Olivier Grisel – Parallel Data Analysis (workshop) – great experimentation/ (first) exposure to parallel tools like map, submit and Dask/Spark. The workshops showed a lot of new tools, here they used futures and snakeviz for example, very cool.
- Testing: Big picture software testing unit testing, Lean Startup, and everything in between and James Saryerwinnie – Next Level Testing: good overview and learning about new libraries to write more/better tests.
- APIs: Flávio Juvenal – How to make a good library API – nice talk showing examples of good vs bad APIs, conclusion: an #API should make the simple easy, the complex possible and the wrong impossible
- Data analysis: Deborah Hanus – Lights, camera, action! Scraping a great dataset to predict Oscar winners – this was a cool example showing how to obtain and prepare movie data, perform data analysis and make predictions. It inspired me to try to do a similar analysis using another data set.

Some that I missed and plan on watching next:

Andrew T Baker – 5 ways to deploy your Python web app in 2017
Nicole Zuckerman – The Glory of pdb’s set trace
Sam Agnew – Hacking Classic Nintendo Games with Python
And definitely quite a few more …

I did see a lot of Python 3.6 mentioned/used, which seems a good trend.

Great community

One talk I wanted to highlight in particular is Mariatta Wijaya’s Dial M For Mentor about finding a mentor and how she became the first Woman Python Core Dev. She received a standing ovation and it goes on to show how awesome our Python community is.

Mentors learn from you too.

…

Good mentor’s don’t hang around in communities that enable and accept trolls and assholes.

Some impressions

Arriving:
Zen of Python conference t-shirt:
The convention center was nice:
Expo hall – meet fellow Pythonistas!
Panel discussion with our BDFL:
A Twitter bot tutorial poster:
Another original poster:
PyCon is getting more visitors every year:
Receiving my share of power holding the pythonicstaffofenlightenment:
Closing dinner at the Portland museum of Art, each table received cards to kickstart the networking (although this happened naturally anyways):