Review of talks I attended or was recommended at Europython 2012

This is a quick jotting down of recommendations with video links related to this years Europython.
It is really intended for other developers in my workplace.
But in case it has wider relevance I have posted it to my blog. Appologies for the rough format - and remember that with 5 tracks and 2 trainings, I only got exposed to a small portion of the talks.

YouTube channel of all talks

Inspiring / Interesting talks

Permission or forgiveness
Linking women programmers, and the approach of Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler to the wider implications of her approach. To enable creativity in an organisation, the rules, that ensure its survival, must be broken. Since middle management's inevitable behaviour will default to blocking permission for innovations, just ignore them wrt. anything technical, for the greater good!

Music Theory - Genetic algorithms and Python
Fun and enthusiastic use of Python to rival the masters of classical music!

State of python
So general view of dyamic langs being on the up ruby, js etc.
Seems that static typing snobbery is Guido's bugbear.
Increase in popularity shown by 800 at ep12, compared to 500 at ep10
Then bunch of internal python language decisions stuff, and dealing with trolls


Stop censorship with Python
Tor project used to allow uncensored internet in China, etc.

The larch environment
Every wanted to write code with pictures rather than boring old text?
Pretty amazing what this PhD student has put together.

Aspect orientated programming
Possibly inspire you to stretch a paradigm as far as it will go (even to breaking point?).

SW Design and APIs

Best to stick with last year's Python API design talk

Scaling or deployment (for Django)

Django under massive loads
Good coverage of scaling django especially wrt. running on Postgresql. Coverage of classic issues wrt. performance and the django ORM. So for example using slice with a queryset always loads the whole queryset into memory.

 How to bootstrap a startup with Django
Coverage of the standard add on components for a medium scale django deployment

 

Bitbucket - Healty webapps throught continous introspection

Have released geordi, django-dogslow and interruptingcow to handle issues.

• geordi provides a URL based means of getting full PDF profiling reporting back for pages
• dogslow does monitoring and email reporting of hotspots with traceback from live systems.
• interruptingcow allows setting of nested timeout levels for doing expensive over lighter operations for the web server

Spotify question session
Useful insights into scaling - particularly for a large scale Python applications using Cassandra.

Need to be careful with compaction routine.
So half load capacity due to it making spikes. So it has to sometimes jump if overloaded
dont see error - to fix this last percentage is very hard. Instead go for pretend its working approach. Just retry to catch failiures. Cassandra - dont upgrade .8 to 1.0 
NB: Employed oracle guys who worked on JVM to fix some of cassandras issues - well JVM/Cassandra bugs it revealed at load!

What I learned from big web app deployments - how to scale application deployments (zope particularly)

concurrent.futures
Concurrent programming made easy. Example was bulk processing of a big Apache log. Ditch the old separate multithread or multiprocessor libraries for this python 3 (and backport 2) package.

Language approaches

Using descriptors - useful to know some of the use cases for these language features
PyPy JIT - a look under the hood now I know that RPython is not R + Python, but restricted Python.
PyPy keynote - coverage of current activity in pypy development

Big Data / Mining 

pandas and pytables - amazing simple API to mine data (in this case financial)

Testing

Lessons in Testing - Disqus

Useful insights into testing

Set up included jenkins, nose etc. Run tests concurrently to speed up test suite.

Note that selenium was painful for them - Far too brittle!

TDD with selenium

The presenter said this may be a little basic level for me - and a bit crowded so I went to other stuff in the end.

Other talks I attended

1. Let your brain talk to computers
2. Ask your BDFL
3. Becoming a better programmer
4. NDB: The new App Engine datastore library
5. Advanced Flask patterns (cancelled)
6. Big A little I (AI patterns in Python)
7. Increasing women's engagement in Python
8. Minimalism in Software development
9. The integrators guide to duct taping
10. Guidelines to writing a Python API
11. Composite key is ready for django 1.4
12. Heavybase: A clinical peer-topeer database
13. Beyond clouds: Open source edge computing with SlapOS
14. Creating federated authorisation for a Django survey system (my talk!)

Europython 2012 - hot stuff

Being English I often tend to start a new conversation with the weather. At Europython this week I had  good reason, it was hot 30 - 35 degrees centrigrade. Whilst at home the UK has been bathed with ... rain and temperatures of 20 at the most. Of course for Florentines it is only a couple of degrees above the norm, so nothing worth talking about. However they were polite enough to respond to this, or any other opening conversational gambit I offered, and in general I found Europython to be a very social event this year, in terms of meeting new people, probably more so than any previous conference I have been to for Python or its frameworks.

At this year's conference I attended on my own, and hence I made a bit more of an effort to be sociable. This along with luckily getting a poster session (that could help justify work sending me!), were prompts to try and start conversations where I may normally have been more reticent.

The conference itself has a great atmosphere for mixing in any case. With possibly four main themes. Core language and implementation developers. Web applications. Data mining and processing. Configuration management and automation tools. Of course within these there are divisions, the investment banking iPython analysers vs. the applied science academic researchers. Or Pyramid vs. Django, etc., but it seems everyone can usefully share ideas, whether they are sales engineers from a large company or a pure hobbyist.

This inclusiveness was also a theme in itself, particularly wrt. women. Kicking off with Alex Martelli's keynote about the inventor of the compiler, along with a lot of other stuff, Grace Hopper.
Unfortunately they are under represented in the coding sector, at work I think its around 20% for programmers, but even that is higher than the average - probably because we are public sector / unionised. This is reflected by much lower membership of our local DBBUG Django group who are mainly drawn from the commercial sector, with only 2 out of around 50 active members. Europython was as bad, at 4% last year, but that has doubled this year to around 60 of the 750 attendees.

Returning to Python themes. The chance to chat to the data miners was most useful since we are currently in a state of transition at work. Having been involved in internal systems, particularly CMS from the days when it was evolving 10 years ago, we are now moving to a more pure R&D role.
This means that CMS work is to be dropped and whilst we want to continue large custom web application work related to research (thats where my poster session on our Django survey system comes in). We also want to be moving towards work that ties up with the University's applied science research - especially big data mining and the like.
So for me the chance to talk (and listen) to people across a range of disciplines was ideal.

Lastly, I also realised how stale my knowledge of the the new features of the language are. Time to get a book on Python 3 - and get back on track I think.  Oh and of course many thanks to the Italian Python community and conference organisers for a really great conference - and more than my fare share of free cocktails - which certainly helped break the ice.