So technically this isn’t a wrap up, because there’s still one day of Sprints to go, but that’s what happens when you have a room full of power, internet, ridiculously smart people, and all the yaks in the world to shave.
If you’ve ever been to a specific programming language-centric conference, you know that it can be a very fun experience. From basic talks to core developer panels, there’s something for everyone.
But what if you went to one of these conferences when you didn’t know the language?
That’s what my PyCon AU was about. I’m not a Python developer by trade. Indeed, in the opening of my talk, I say how I was a part of the diversity staff because I’m a ruby developer.
A ruby developer? At a python conference?
Yes. That’s what makes the Python so great - they understand that it’s not the language you use, it’s the concepts behind it. There are many shared themes, concepts and values that cross language boundaries that means that discluding these people from your community is limiting your ability to grow.
Heck, this weekend I learnt that not only does Ruby on Rails and Django sound like similar things, the core developers actually share information about when they find security issues and how they fix them, because the codebases are so similar.
Speaking of security, there were some really interesting talks related to security our applications and our data: Tom Eastman’s Playing to Lose and Carina C. Zona’s Consequences of an Insighytful Algorithm discuss very interesting practical and ethical issues that we need to take into account when dealing with data collection and application hosting.
Some other amazing talks that I was fortunate enough to attend were:
- Designed for education: a Python solution by Carrie Anne Philbin - Naming functions is hard, even harder when children use your functions and they are still learning to read
- OpenStack: A vision for the future by Monty Taylor- we need more Shakespeare in our lives, and many people working on similar themes to make multiple solutions makes for a more complete ecosystem
- The one true way of doing Django deployments… by Tom Eastman - there is no real way, and saying words that we rarely have to verbally articulate is hard. “Production should be boring. Production should be stable. The tech shouldn’t excite you.. except for Django”
- Money, Money, Money - Writing software, in a rich (wo)man’s world by Russell Keith-Magee - (just watch the video on this one. I couldn’t tweet it fast enough to take any notes)
- Ansible, Simplicity, and the Zen of Python by Todd Owen - “Oh master, isn’t it wonderful that a laborious process can be automated [in Puppet] in just four days?”
- Adventures in pip land by Robert Collins - “Find links has been deprecated from pip but can’t be removed. Deprecated but can’t be removed. Let that sink in.”
- Talking to Browsers with CORS by Michael Krotscheck - because XML ‘features’ from the 1990’s need to be fixed.
Update 2015-08-09 All the videos are now up on Youtube
So are you missing PyCon AU already? Upset that you couldn’t make it? Want another? The speaker schedule for Kiwi PyCon was released overnight. Some of the talks from AU are getting a reprise, and there are some very shiny looking new talks that look very interesting. It’ll be an awesome weekend.