Ross Patterson's Blog - Posts tagged pycon2012

PyCon 2012 Talks

2016-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

A bit about my experience at my first PyCon and the talks.

I’m riding the train home from the last day of the PyCon sprints following the PyCon talks so it’s time for a report-out.

PyCon 2012 Itself

This is a very well organized conference. The whole thing felt both smooth and relaxed, which seems like quite a feat. It was also huge with something like ~2200 attendees if I remember correctly. I was still finding Plone people at the end of the last day of talks. It was pretty easy to not find people there.

The talks were short, I was always surprised when they were over. I think this is a great approach. It draws economy out of the presenters and cuts down on the zone-out effect. They had a Guidebook app which was pretty cool. Even the meals were surprisingly good given that they were provided by the venue. Even the wireless was pretty good and I’ve seen much worse at 200-300 person conferences (cough*Plone*cough).

Now for the nitpicks…

It was harder than it should have been to find out which rooms talks were in. Firstly, the otherwise excellent Guidebook app, didn’t have the room numbers on the talk descriptions. Even the schedule on the conference web site, however, forced you to scroll around to try to find out which room corresponded to the track the talk was for.

The venue was pretty good, but the location is kinda terrible. On a good day I can tolerate the more interesting parts of the south bay, but the Santa Clara Convention Center is deep in the soulless spotlessness of the business-parkified heart of Santa Clara. This might be great if your choice form of entertainment is the likes of Great America (right across the street) but if you like any character whatsoever, you’re SOL. I’m glad the venue food was better than I’d expect, and in such a location providing lunch is a must for such a conference, but I would enjoy it a lot more if there were interesting places to socialize in.

Talk Highlights

There were a lot of good talks with great coverage of technical topics. I was pleasantly surprised to find a healthy amount of non-technical talks, including talks on docs as well. Finally, it was good for a died-in-the-wool web programmer such as myself to be reminded that Python is used for other things.

Here are some of the talks I most enjoyed:

Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes

Favorite quote of the con: “I was sure this would be the solution.”
A resume-based WSGI Load Balancer

Jim, you beautiful mad-man!
Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python User Group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women

I want to be a part of something like this!
Improving Documentation with “Beginner’s Mind” (or: Fixing the Django Tutorial)

I’m looking at us, Plone docs.
Python Metaprogramming for Mad Scientists and Evil Geniuses

His re-definition of “Mad Scientist” as someone doing crazy things becuse it’s cool and they can, and “Evil Genius” as someone doing crazy things because it works have now become a part of my lexicon.
What Python can learn from Java

Gave my faith in Python a healthy shake-up.
Python Meets the Arduino

It’s looking like microcontrollers for the hobbyist are getting simple enough for even me to take a stab.
Building a Kinect game with Python

So cool. Damn you, Microsoft! Of course, you wouldn’t be such a problem if you didn’t do something right.

Updated on 12 August 2016

Imported from Plone on Mar 15, 2021. The date for this update is the last modified date in Plone.

PyCon 2012 Sprints

2012-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Sprinting after PyCon and my first time working with and contributing to Pyramid.

Sprinting on Pyramid

Really my conference review should be taken worth a grain of salt, because I never go for the talks, it’s all about the sprints. Having so thoroughly enjoyed sprinting since I came out of my shell and joined the Plone community in earnest, it’s always the only thing I’m really focused on. What can I say? In this wonderful age where, through open-source communities and the recognition of the ambiguous stuff that helps them thrive, we all recognize that things like docs and diversity are as important as the quality of code or the power of features, I’m still a code monkey at heart.

Since there were no Plone sprints that I heard of or saw on the boards, I took the chance to sprint on Pyramid, part of the Pylons project and love child of repoze. I’ve been wanting to learn Pyramid for quite some time now since I noticed how many of my favorite Zope people have moved to Pyramid. So I went to the Pyramid room, sat down and asked what someone with plenty of zope experience could do.

The Pyramid sprinters were a great group, very welcoming and friendly. They remind me a lot of the things I most love about the Plone community. It also gave me the chance to work closely with Chris McDonough. Chris is very smart, builds great software, and is just very kind-hearted.

Here’s some of the stuff I worked on:

add IP range/network restriction to pyramid_debugtoolbar

I used this simple feature task to cut my teeth on the Pyramid development environment and tool-chain. It was the first time in a long time I worked outside a buildout environment and it made for some interesting comparisons. They keep things really simple relying only on distribute’s setuptools and virtualenv.

I have to say, I still prefer working with buildout. Buildout’s caching is much better than easy_install’s and virtualenv so updating the environment after changes is smoother and faster. For testing against multiple Python versions and implementations, such as Jython and PyPy, Pyramid uses tox which is pretty slick and very useful. I’d love to see something like this for deploying the same buildout with different versions of Python.
support Python 3 in repoze.sendmail

This was my first time tackling Python 2 and 3 compatibility issues. I have to say it’s just not as hard as I feared.
System Message: INFO/1 (/builds/rpatterson/ross-pattersons-site/blog/pycon-2012-sprints/index.rst, line 15); backlink

Duplicate explicit target name: “repoze.sendmail”.

improve and centralize email message serializing in repoze.sendmail

The one place where there was a lot of Python 2 and 3 compatibility pain was in the encoding of email messages. In this case, as in others I suspect, the problem was that encoding was being done all over the place in a not-very-well-architected way and the real solution was to clean things up and put in more clearly defined boundaries and interfaces.

That task would have been impossible without R. David Murray. I pestered him endlessly and he helped me learn all the deep, dark corners of the email protocols and the Python email package, both of which have considerable quirks which some would call bugs. At the end of it, I had a clear sense of all the quirks of encoding emails and all the things that the email package doesn’t already do. I baked those into repoze.sendmail.encoding and added that support as a part sending mail through repoze.sendmail.

Once that was in place, finishing Python 2 and 3 compatibility was a snap.
add Python 3 support to pyramid_mailer

Again, once repoze.sendmail.encoding was in-place, I just ripped all the email encoding support out of pyramid_mailer and Python 2 and 3 compatibility was a cinch.
System Message: INFO/1 (/builds/rpatterson/ross-pattersons-site/blog/pycon-2012-sprints/index.rst, line 15); backlink

Duplicate explicit target name: “pyramid_mailer”.

fix Cc/Bcc witout To handling in pyramid_mailer

While I had my hands in pyramid_mailer, I fixed a bug reported by Michael Merickel.
add support for multiple request parameters when registering Pyramid views

I’m not even sure what this stuff does, but Pyramid has such great test coverage, I was able to get started. I’m still waiting for feeback to see what I’m not yet understanding.
updating warnings handling in Pyramid tests

Just a simple test fixture update to cleanup output.

Updated on 16 March 2012

Imported from Plone on Mar 15, 2021. The date for this update is the last modified date in Plone.