PyCon 2016
This is Mattias Sluis’ report of the PyCon 2016 conference. Mattias is one of the Elements developers that flew to the West Coast to attend PyCon 2016.
From Monday May 30th till Wednesday June 1st we had the amazing opportunity to attend PyCon 2016. PyCon US is the largest Python conference in the world with over 3,000 participants this year. It is the place where developers from all continents come together to hear, see and talk all things Python. PyCon is organised by the Python Software Foundation (PSF), the nonprofit organization that is dedicated to “promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers”.
This years edition was held in Portland Oregon on the Pacific North West of the United States. The eccentric in ‘Rose City’ served as the venue. Located across the water from downtown Portland and right next to Interstate 5, the artery that connects the north with south of the west coast, the venue is easy to reach and close to all the great things Portland has to offer.
With software development being world dominated by man it was great to see that no less than 40% of all the talks this year were actually held by women. The wide application of Python in the digital world was displayed through the different subjects of the talks: music, science, education, web, health, robotics, operations, etc. All of this contributed to diversity of both Python and the conference and it is why the Python community is so vast and diverse. And we got to be a part of it!
Day 1
Although officially the conference started with two tutorial days, we started off on Monday with a great welcome speech from Brandon Rhodes followed by a very intellectual keynote by Lorena Barba who talked about the importance of communication and some of the abstraction behind it. After a short break to process all that information, which was a bit too academic for my taste, we got to start with the first set of talks. With five tracks of talks there were plenty choices in subjects yet we all decided that Thinking in Coroutines by Łukasz Langa was the one we had to see. The talk was about Python’s new async.io feature that makes asynchronous activities a lot easier to do in Python. This was one of the talks that very much applies to things we are doing on a daily basis with our clients and very informative. After the first session we split up a little to see some more different talks which included subjects like ‘Refactoring’, ‘Concurrency’ and ‘Security’.
After a Mexican food-themed lunch and checking out the different sponsor booths we continued our journey diving deeper into some of the harder Python parts and learning more about Docker, Postgres and the very popular Internet of Things. I very much enjoyed the talk about ‘Usable Ops’ by Kate Heddleston and Joyce Lang which wasn’t very technical at all. They explained the importance of good usability for operations and how on-boarding is often a problem because of bad usability. Often there are complicated tools and processes that are hard to get to know and that, if used the wrong way, can actually do a lot of damage. And we all know that this is true so we should keep this in mind.
Mike Graham’s talk about the life cycle of a Python class gave some more in-depth knowledge of how Python works and was followed by a short break with just two more session of talks. At this time a break was very welcome because every single session was filled with an overwhelming amount of information that needed to be processed. Lightning talks followed the last sessions with lots of short talks about various projects and an important awareness talk by Russell Keith-Magee regarding mental health issues that lot’s of developers face.
Stuffed with information and new knowledge I walked back to the hotel to rest. The first day had been a really great day and has been very valuable.
Day 2
With my mind still processing the first day I arrived at the convention center for a quick breakfast and a first set of morning lightning talks. Most attendees were mostly looking forward to the first keynote of the day presented by Guido van Rossum. Guido, aside from being Dutch, is the author of Python and “Benevolent Dictator For Life” in the Python community. First he gave us an update of the current state of Python and things that are in the pipeline for the coming versions. He also repeated a speech he held on Kings Day, earlier this year at the Dutch embassy, sharing about his life and the importance of programming.
Parisa Tabrisz had the challenge of giving a keynote after Guido. The “Security Princess” that leads the Google Chrome security team challenged us to continuously think about how we can break things.Thinking like a hacker can help us to make better software. Three new sessions of talks followed this talk and we got to learn about ‘the importance of documentation’, testing, the benefits of http2 and the mysteries of Python meta classes.
Filled with Mac and Cheese, steak and chicken we started on the second set of sessions which included a really good talk from Daniel Riti regarding “Graceful Degradation when Services Fail”. This talk gave us some really nice improvements that we can build into our web services to make them more robust. A failing demo during a talk about “structured data from unstructured text” was a big bummer but Van Lindberg still managed to provide interesting information about interpreting human text with software. After some good pointers regarding code reviews (“Split reviews into smaller diffs”) the day finished with one more set of lighting talks that were mostly funny and not too serious. Some people took on the challenge of live programming in front of thousands in an attempt to demo something in the remaining seconds of their talks.
Day 3
The third and last day of the main conference is always a little different from the first two days. The schedule is different and, surprisingly enough, also several people already headed home. The subjects of most of the talks were usually aimed at smaller groups of people. Van Lindberg kicked off with a keynote regarding copyright and the US legal system. Several interesting developments regarding big patent and copyright related law suites also affect the open source world. Cris Ewing followed with a keynote about the evolution of the content management system Plone and its evolution in the past years.
After some poster sessions, a job fair and lunch it was time for the final three sessions of talks. With subjects regarding the medical field, public health, deaf awareness, researchers and diversity it was a bit harder to pick out talks that were really interesting without getting too complicated. The very last session had one very popular talk “Removing Python’s GIL: The Gilectomy” by Larry Hastings. In a room packed with developers he held a very technical talk about the process of removing Pythons ‘Global Interpreter Lock’. It was very interesting to see all the challenges there are to overcome in order to make Python run on multiple cores.
Of course the conference could not end without some closing words and one final keynote. K Lars Lohn played his electric flute as part of his story about complexity and the importance of diversity in the community. Using music, video, images and mathematics he told a very personal story that grabbed everyones attention. Conference chairman Brandon Rhodes wrapped it all up with a big “thank you” to all the volunteers that made the event possible.
All the PyCon talks are recorded and will be available online as well as most of the presentations so make sure you look at those. I know I will, because some subjects you just need to hear twice in order to get everything out of it.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on June 6, 2016.
