PyCon Canada 2018

chris — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 19:20:02 GMT

I've very happy to have had the opportunity to attend and speak at PyCon Canada here in Toronto last week.

PyCon has always been a very well organized conference. There are a wide range of talks available, even on topics not directly related to Python. I've attended previous PyCon events in the past, but never the Canadian one!

My talk was titled How Mozilla uses Python to Build and Ship Firefox. The slides are available here if you're interested. I believe the sessions were recorded, but they're not yet available online. I was happy with the attendance at the session, and the questions during and after the talk.

As part of the talk, I mentioned how Release Engineering is a very distributed team. Afterwards, many people had followup questions about how to work effectively with remote teams, which gave me a great opportunity to recommend John O'Duinn's new book, Distributed Teams.

Some other highlights from the conference:

CircuitPython: Python on hardware I really enjoyed learning about CircuitPython, and the work that Adafruit is doing to make programming and electronics more accessible.
Using Python to find Russian Twitter troll tweets aimed at Canada A really interesting dive into 3 million tweets that FiveThirtyEight made available for analysis.
PEP 572: The Walrus Operator My favourite quote from the talk: "Dictators are people too!" If you haven't followed Python governance, Guido stepped down as BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) after the PEP was resolved. Dustin focused much of his talk about how we in the Python community, and more generally in tech, need to treat each other better.
Who's There? Building a home security system with Pi & Slack A great example of how you can get started hacking on home automation with really simple tools.
Froilán Irzarry's Keynote talk on the second day was really impressive.
You Don't Need That! Design patterns in Python My main takeaway from this was that you shouldn't try and write Python code as if it were Java or C++ :) Python has plenty of language features built-in that make many classic design patterns unnecessary or trivial to implement.
Numpy to PyTorch Really neat to learn about PyTorch, and leveraging the GPU to accelerate computation.
Flying Python - A reverse engineering dive into Python performance Made me want to investigate Balrog performance, and also look at ways we can improve Python startup time. Some neat tips about examining disassembled Python bytecode.
Working with Useless Machines Hilarious talk about (ab)using IoT devices.
Gathering Related Functionality: Patterns for Clean API Design I really liked his approach for creating clean APIs for things like class constructors. He introduced a module called variants which lets you write variants of a function / class initializer to support varying types of parameters. For example, a common pattern is to have a function that takes either a string path to a file, or a file object. Instead of having one function that supports both types of arguments, variants allows you to make distinct functions for each type, but in a way that makes it easy to share underlying functionality and also not clutter your namespace.

PyCon 2016 report

chris — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 19:39:40 GMT

I had the opportunity to spend last week in Portland for PyCon 2016. I'd like to share some of my thoughts and some pointers to good talks I was able to attend. The full schedule can be found here and all the videos are here.

Monday

Brandon Rhodes' Welcome to PyCon was one of the best introductions to a conference I've ever seen. Unfortunately I can't find a link to a recording... What I liked about it was that he made everyone feel very welcome to PyCon and to Portland. He explained some of the simple (but important!) practical details like where to find the conference rooms, how to take transit, etc. He noted that for the first time, they have live transcriptions of the talks being done and put up on screens beside the speaker slides for the hearing impaired.

He also emphasized the importance of keeping questions short during Q&A after the regular sessions. "Please form your question in the form of a question." I've been to way too many Q&A sessions where the person asking the question took the opportunity to go off on a long, unrelated tangent. For the most part, this advice was followed at PyCon: I didn't see very many long winded questions or statements during Q&A sessions.

Machete-mode Debugging

(abstract; video)

Ned Batchelder gave this great talk about using python's language features to debug problematic code. He ran through several examples of tricky problems that could come up, and how to use things like monkey patching and the debug trace hook to find out where the problem is. One piece of advice I liked was when he said that it doesn't matter how ugly the code is, since it's only going to last 10 minutes. The point is the get the information you need out of the system the easiest way possible, and then you can undo your changes.

Refactoring Python

(abstract; video)

I found this session pretty interesting. We certainly have lots of code that needs refactoring!

Security with object-capabilities

(abstract; video; slides)

I found this interesting, but a little too theoretical. Object capabilities are a completely orthogonal way to access control lists as a way model security and permissions. It was hard for me to see how we could apply this to the systems we're building.

Awaken your home

(abstract; video)

A really cool intro to the Home Assistant project, which integrates all kinds of IoT type things in your home. E.g. Nest, Sonos, IFTTT, OpenWrt, light bulbs, switches, automatic sprinkler systems. I'm definitely going to give this a try once I free up my raspberry pi.

Finding closure with closures

(abstract; video)

A very entertaining session about closures in Python. Does Python even have closures? (yes!)

Life cycle of a Python class

(abstract; video)

Lots of good information about how classes work in Python, including some details about meta-classes. I think I understand meta-classes better after having attended this session. I still don't get descriptors though!

(I hope Mike learns soon that __new__ is pronounced "dunder new" and not "under under new"!)

Deep learning

(abstract; video)

Very good presentation about getting started with deep learning. There are lots of great libraries and pre-trained neural networks out there to get started with!

Building protocol libraries the right way

(abstract; video)

I really enjoyed this talk. Cory Benfield describes the importance of keeping a clean separation between your protocol parsing code, and your IO. It not only makes things more testable, but makes code more reusable. Nearly every HTTP library in the Python ecosystem needs to re-implement its own HTTP parsing code, since all the existing code is tightly coupled to the network IO calls.

Tuesday

Guido's Keynote

(video)

Some interesting notes in here about the history of Python, and a look at what's coming in 3.6.

Click

(abstract; video)

An intro to the click module for creating beautiful command line interfaces.

I like that click helps you to build testable CLIs.

HTTP/2 and asynchronous APIs

(abstract; video)

A good introduction to what HTTP/2 can do, and why it's such an improvement over HTTP/1.x.

Remote calls != local calls

(abstract; video)

Really good talk about failing gracefully. He covered some familiar topics like adding timeouts and retries to things that can fail, but also introduced to me the concept of circuit breakers. The idea with a circuit breaker is to prevent talking to services you know are down. For example, if you have failed to get a response from service X the past 5 times due to timeouts or errors, then open the circuit breaker for a set amount of time. Future calls to service X from your application will be intercepted, and will fail early. This can avoid hammering a service while it's in an error state, and works well in combination with timeouts and retries of course.

I was thinking quite a bit about Ben's redo module during this talk. It's a great module for handling retries!

Diving into the wreck

(abstract; video)

A look into diagnosing performance problems in applications. Some neat tools and techniques introduced here, but I felt he blamed the DB a little too much :)

Wednesday

Magic Wormhole

(abstract; video; slides)

I didn't end up going to this talk, but I did have a chance to chat with Brian before. magic-wormhole is a tool to safely transfer files from one computer to another. Think scp, but without needing ssh keys set up already, or direct network flows. Very neat tool!

Computational Physics

(abstract; video)

How to do planetary orbit simulations in Python. Pretty interesting talk, he introduced me to Feynman, and some of the important characteristics of the simulation methods introduced.

Small batch artisinal bots

(abstract; video)

Hilarious talk about building bots with Python. Definitely worth watching, although unfortunately it's only a partial recording.

Gilectomy

(abstract; video)

The infamous GIL is gone! And your Python programs only run 25x slower!

Larry describes why the GIL was introduced, what it does, and what's involved with removing it. He's actually got a fork of Python with the GIL removed, but performance suffers quite a bit when run without the GIL.

Lars' Keynote

(video)

If you watch only one video from PyCon, watch this. It's just incredible.

chris' random ramblings (Posts about pycon)

PyCon Canada 2018

PyCon 2016 report

Monday

Machete-mode Debugging

Refactoring Python

Security with object-capabilities

Awaken your home

Finding closure with closures

Life cycle of a Python class

Deep learning

Building protocol libraries the right way

Tuesday

Guido's Keynote

Click

HTTP/2 and asynchronous APIs

Remote calls != local calls

Diving into the wreck

Wednesday

Magic Wormhole

Computational Physics

Small batch artisinal bots

Gilectomy

Lars' Keynote