Pycon India 2018: What i learned?

Hi folks, recently I had the pleasure of attending 2-day Pycon conference in hyderabad, India. It was also the 10th year of pycon being organized in india. Pretty sweet achievement if you ask me. 😃 There was little bit of something for everyone and I become aware of and learned few new things in and around the python ecosystem.

Disclaimer: This blog in no way covers all the sessions that happened but just the ones which i attended.

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Day 1:

There were many excellent talks to choose from and I did attend most of them.

Keynote 1
By Armin Ronacher

The Conference was kicked off by the creator of flask/jinja Armin Ronacher and his key note was mostly about how python community can learn a lot from how Rust lang’s community is operating in the light of Guido van rossums decision to step down as BDFL. It was quite interesting and he highlighted few areas of potential improvements which python core devs can take going forward.

Python Project Workflows — Continuous Deployment Friendly
By Abhijit Gadgil

This talk illustrated how Pipenv is actually a natural evolution over pip and virtualenv created by none other than creator of requests module in python (kennethreitz) Also how to setup pylint with a pylintrc file to get awesome linting for python code and also leveraging a pre-commit git hook to ensure no code which violates code quality is committed was interesting.

Inside the World’s Largest Python Course on Coursera

By Charles Severance.

There was an interesting talk by Chuck Severance on __his open courses for python learning. It was quite amazing to see how he was able to evolve from creating LMS (learning management systems) since the 90s to actually one of the most popular courses on coursera for Python for everybody. He is planning to follow this up with Django for everybody based on testing this course out with his students in his university classes. Looks quite interesting.

Metaclasses and decorators: a match made in space
By Ishan Srivastava

This was an interesting talk by 3rd-year undergrad student on how metaclasses work in python and how they form the basis for many behind the wraps implementations in django and other projects. Real Python has an very good article explaining how metaclasses work.

Community Talk
By 
Kushal Das, PSF 
Mario Behling, FOSSASIA

Next up there was a talk about the Python software foundation that supports the development of the language we love the most and how we can also contribute.

Also, Mario behling gave an introduction for people who want to contribute to FOSS (Free and open source software) from fossasia, also they are planning to have a Pocket size hardware device as an open source project which looked super 🆒. There were mentions of some interesting programs that people can participate in like Code heat, Google code in, GSOC, Summer internship program, Advanced developer, details of which can be checked out in fossasia website.

Keynote 2
By Sidu Ponnapa

The day ended with an awesome keynote by Sidu Ponnappa about how scaling an engineering org is similar to how a tech product is scaled. Lots of nice tips and practical advices to be taken from this. What stood out for me was two basic ideas:

• Engineers (devs) become best managers since they really understand all the challenges and mostly are able to reason logically (just like in code)
• CRY principle (Continuous repeat yourself) when you are trying to communicate since any form of communication between two individuals always has some elements of ambiquity.

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Day 2:

Testing micro-services made easy
By Devi A S L

This talk was more around how contract testing can be an easier alternative to end to end tests and really assists in finding issues in a microservices architecture. Devi showed some practical python code using PACT framework.

Cleaning data with Python
By Anand S

Really loved this talk by anand, he is such a clear orator and was able to basically explain the techniques that go behind cleaning data using python libs like pandas (🐼). He took a practical example of how data can be extracted from PDF and then cleaned to feed into ML algorithms.

Some key libs:

• Jelly Fish for doing fuzzy matching of strings (Fingerprinting)

Alexa enabled smart home programming with Python
By Sonal Raj

This talk was really awesome, the speaker had used python flask to basically expose certain endpoints hosted in AWS which could be invoked with certain Alexa skills to control his smart home. As an example he showed how its possible to control wemo devices using fauxmo

Some new python libs/modules that I came to know during this talk:

• Dash, Cherry pie are some other python frameworks for making UI interfaces apart from the more popular Django project.
• Ngrok : Can be used to expose local web server using public URLs
• IFTTS: Allows devices to talk to each other

Experience with Python type hints
By Kracekumar Ramaraju

This talk was more around how type hints can be incorporated in python via typing module and how it makes sense more for having a layer of security on your app boundaries.

Some new libs that i heard about in this talk.

• mypy
• monkey type by instagram
• pyre
• Freeze gun: module to basically allow mocking of datetime module to allow for more reliable tests

Keynote 4
By Carol Willing

This talk was a perfect end to pycon where Carol Willing who is Cpython core dev and part of Jupytyr project explained what options are being discussed on the governance model for python with Guidos step down and also what values we can imbibe and follow to ensure the lang evolves further. Her slides are now made public on speakerdeck

Lightning talks ⛈:

These are usually the best part of any conferences since you get to know so many new ideas as quickly as possible.

I really liked this one talk by a student called biswaz about how during recent Kerela floods in India OSS community created a Django website to aid in relief and rescue efforts. Read more about it in this blog

Also, there was a person who was able to use python code to recognize possible patterns in a minesweeper to design the ultimate script to beat minesweeper every time. 🤷‍♂

Thats all folks. For more details you can check out pycon website. The talks recording might come out. Be sure to check it out when it comes.

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