Conferences – Page 5 – Walking Contradiction

Review: GlueCon 2014

GlueCon 2014 was held on May 21-22 at the Omni Interlocken Hotel in Broomfield, Colorado, and I was fortunate enough to be selected as a speaker there for the second year in a row. For those of you who aren’t familiar with GlueCon, it’s not quite an unconference, but it is a loosely-structured gathering of people working in lots of different technologies that drive the web today, with the focus on the “glue” that holds them all together: developers.

The morning of the 21st was a series of keynotes, and devops seemed to be the topic on everyone’s mind. There was one keynote in general that I strongly disagreed with: John Sheehan of Runscope claimed that “API SDKs Will Ruin Your Life” (the title of the keynote). The assumption, of course, was that the only reason that anyone would use an SDK is because the native API is terrible, and it is the reliance on SDKs that is causing API devs to get sloppy. While that might be true in some sense, the responsibility for creating a good API rests on the API developers, and if they are not professional enough to take pride in the quality of their APIs, I doubt that any SDK would change that. Creating good, consistent APIs is not easy, and typically shouldn’t be left to the the people creating the underlying product that the API is exposing.

The afternoon was broken into several tracks, with the idea that the talks in each track were related, and would happen one right after the other, with no break in between. This was when my talk was scheduled, and it was part of the Cloud track. The talk was titled “How to Leave Rackspace”, and no, I wasn’t encouraging people to leave Rackspace! (I like having a job!). It was about the realities of portability among clouds, and emphasized the importance of data gravity binding you to a provider. I also covered the importance of API compatibility, and how working with providers sharing a common API, such as OpenStack-based providers, won’t do anything about data gravity, but will at least allow your applications to run on different providers.

The script I showed used pyrax to transfer a running compute instance in Rackspace to the HP cloud, so that you could move an entire server with just a few lines of code. The overall lesson, however, was to take the time to choose your provider carefully up front, instead of relying on some promise of portability later. The audience seemed pretty engaged during the talk, but there weren’t many questions and what seemed like lukewarm applause afterwards. I was a little disappointed, but noticed the same pattern for the other speakers who followed me, so I thought it might be due to the format. Later on I did run into several people who attended my session, and their feedback was very positive, so that made me feel better about the talk. This was the first time I’ve given this particular talk, and so I was very appreciative of the feedback.

After my talk was an excellent talk by Cornelia Davis of Pivotal that gave us a peek under the hood of Cloud Foundry. I was familiar with what Cloud Foundry could do, but I hadn’t had any exposure to the underlying architecture, so this was very interesting. Following that were talks on OpenStack Swift and network virtualization, which were both full of useful information, and then there was a talk on “The New Development Experience” that had some good stuff on Bluemix, IBM’s implementation of Cloud Foundry, but was too filled with buzzwords to be interesting. For a sample of what I mean, here’s a sentence from the talk abstract:

“The cloud combined with the need-for-time to value is driving a movement toward a scalable and flexible cloud computing development model that provides application developers with the freedom to innovate rapidly, integrate with existing infrastructure, use or create APIs, and create cloud native applications”.

I spent the rest of the day working at the booth, and noticed a distinct difference in attitude from last year’s crowd. For some reason, the crowd last year was not only very pro-AWS, but actively hostile to OpenStack. This year I didn’t get any of that negativity; instead, I spoke with developers and business people who knew about OpenStack and Rackspace, and simply wanted more information. My favorite, though, was Atsushi Yamanaka, from IDC Frontier in Japan. He flew to the Denver area the previous day from Tokyo to attend GlueCon, and was flying back to Tokyo the day after GlueCon ended. Talk about dedication! He wanted to get a better idea of Rackspace’s presence in the Asia/Pacific area, both current and future, and unfortunately I had to explain that those decisions are made at much higher pay grades than mine!

The second day of the conference similarly opened with a series of keynotes. I had to work the booth and also work on some code, so I didn’t catch most of them. I did, however, catch the keynote by Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud Computing, which I found to be equal parts entertaining and informative. I’ve known Joshua for several years now, since the birth of OpenStack, and know as well as anyone how he can tend to overstate things just to get a rise out of the audience. He also knocked SDKs, but made it clear that it was only when they were used as crutches for bad APIs, and I had to comment about it on Twitter. The example he gave was that if instead of a website, you had created a duck, when you create the duck API, it would be dumb to expose the gizzard and the inner workings of its circulatory system, yet developers do the equivalent of that regularly. When people want to use your duck, they are interested in its ability to fly or swim or eat or quack, and don’t really care about the incredibly complex implementation details that make those abilities possible. Developers, on the other hand, are so proud of their incredibly complex implementations that they tend to feature them front and center in their API design. This makes for an unwieldy API, which then almost forces users of it to rely on an SDK to be able to do anything useful.

There was another keynote by Julia Ferraioli from Google on developer outreach, and since that’s my job, I was interested to hear what she had to say. Unfortunately, the talk was really nothing more than the general knowledge stuff that people working in this field for any length of time already know; I certainly didn’t pick up anything new. I hope, though, that maybe some of the non-developers in the crowd learned something.

I wish I could comment on more of the talks, but again I spent a good part of the day either working the booth or writing code for work. I did see a couple of talks that revolved around novel uses of Docker to either speed up or reduce the cost of CI/CD enviroments; it certainly seems as though Docker was the new hotness among developers at GlueCon.

I can’t say enough good things about the event itself: the location, the organization, the food/refreshments, the attendees, and the quality of the talks were all excellent. If you get a chance to attend GlueCon 2015 next year, go for it!

PyCon 2014 Review

Better late than never, right?

PyCon 2014 happened two weeks ago, and I’m just getting around to write about it now. Why the delay? Well, I took a few days of vacation to explore and enjoy Montréal with my woman after PyCon, and when I returned I found myself trapped under a mountain of work that had built up in my absence. I’ve finally dug myself out enough to take the time to write up my impressions.

This PyCon (my 11th) was different in many ways, not only for the fact that for the first time, the US PyCon was not in the US! It was held in Canada in beautiful (and cold!) Montréal. It was the first time in years that I did not arrive early enough to help with the bag stuffing event, which has always been a highlight of my PyCon experiences. I arrived late Thursday afternoon, and just made it to the Opening Reception, where I not only touched based with my fellow Rackers, but also ran into dozens of Python people I have gotten to know over the years. PyCon is special in that regard: while I have technical contacts at many of the conferences I attend, I consider many of the people at PyCon to be my friends.

I was pleasantly surprised by the bold choice for the opening keynote: John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

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He pulled no punches, and let the audience know exactly where he stood on matters of security, openness, government spying, and free information in a society. I enjoyed his talk immensely, but I knew that some with more conservative views might not respond positively to the anti-corporation, anti-BigBrother tone of his talk, and judging by the sight of several people leaving during the talk, I think I was right. Still, I appreciated that the primary conferences for one of the most important Open languages took that risk.

I attended several sessions, and bounced between them and my duties at the Rackspace booth in the vendor area. We were once again a major sponsor of PyCon, and this gives me great pleasure, as I had first convinced Rackspace to become a sponsor shortly after I joined the company 6 years ago. We benefit so much from Python and the work of the PSF, it’s only right that we give something back.

I won’t go into detail about the individual sessions, but I would encourage you to check out the videos of all the talks that are available on the pyvideo site. The quality of the presentations keeps getting better and better every year, which is a great reflection on the talk selection committee, who had to select just 95 talks from a total of 650 proposals. That is a thankless task, so let me say “thank you” to the folks who reviewed all those proposals and made the tough calls.

I would also like to note that this year 1/3 of the speakers were women, and by some estimates, the percentage of female attendees was nearly as high! (They don’t record the sex of a person when they register; hence the need for estimates). This is a phenomenal result in the traditionally male-dominated tech industry, and it isn’t by accident. The PSF has actively encouraged women to attend, both by creating (and standing behind) a Code of Conduct, as well as offering financial assistance to those who might not otherwise be able to attend. And this year was another first: onsite child care during the main conference days. I think this is an amazing addition to PyCon, even though my kids are grown. It allows many people to come who would otherwise not be able, and also encouraged more families to travel together, making PyCon the hub of their vacation plans.

That’s exactly what I did, too. Linda flew into Montréal on Saturday evening, hung around PyCon for the closing session so that she could get a glimpse into the strange geek world I inhabit regularly, and meet some of my friends. We spent the next few days exploring this city that neither of us had visited before, enjoying ourselves immensely. Coming from South Texas, we could have done without the near-freezing temperatures and snow, though! Here was the view from our hotel window: OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It was a wonderful vacation, but much too short! We’re really looking forward to returning next year for PyCon 2015!

PyCon Canada Review

It’s been almost a week since PyCon Canada ended, and I had meant to write up a review, but I was busy, so better late than never.

Besides an opportunity to learn more about Python, this conference served as a “training ground” for next year’s PyCon Montréal, which is where the 2014 US PyCon will be held. Yeah, I know, it seems silly to still call it PyCon US instead of PyCon North America, but I suppose it has to do with domain names, trademarks, etc., so I’ll refrain from ranting about that. So to that end, I volunteered to be an MC for roughly half of the total conference. Normally for PyCon you have two roles: Session Chair, who introduces the speaker, times the talk, and manages the Q&A session; and Session Runner, who makes sure that the speaker gets from the green room to the correct session room, and who handles any problems such as missing video adapters, etc. But for PyCon CA, this was changed so that there was an MC and a Runner. The MC was someone with experience from PyCon US, and they served for half of the day in the room. There were fresh runners for each session, but rather than just escort the speaker, they did everything that session chairs and runners do, with the MC guiding them and making sure that they knew what was expected, and who could help out if there were any problems. So in many ways, though I spent half the conference running the talks, I felt like I hardly did anything. The runners did just about everything, and I only had to help out a few times. I have no worries that they’ll be ready for the big leagues next year!

As expected, there were many interesting sessions. I’m not going to give you a summary of everything I saw that I liked, but instead I’ll touch on a few highlights. Probably the one that made the biggest impression on me had nothing to do with Python per se, but instead was about Sketch, a programming language designed by MIT to get children thinking about programming without saddling them with the tedium of learning syntax. This was shown in the keynote on Sunday given by Karen Brennan, who is an Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University. Besides making it easy for the kids to get started learning about programming concepts, it also makes it easy for them to share their projects, or to take someone else’s project and add to it. In other words, they are teaching kids about the benefits of open source and shared code! And while it’s designed for kids, I think it would also be a huge benefit for non-technical adults by helping familiarize themselves with programming without having to get totally geeked out.

Another talk I enjoyed was Git Happens, which was given by Jessica Kerr. This was one of the talks for which I was MC’ing, and hadn’t otherwise planned on attending, as I’m comfortable enough with Git. But rather than be bored, her way of explaining how Git works was much, much clearer than I have ever been able to manage when helping someone else get up to speed with Git.

Brandon Rhodes gave an excellent talk entitled Skyfield and 15 Years of Bad APIs , which covered his efforts to re-write his astronomical calculation library. It was fascinating to see how decisions which seemed reasonable at the time turned out to be less than optimal, and how he learned from them to make the new version much cleaner. As an aside, if you haven’t seen Brandon talk, you’re missing something special. He blends insight with an extremely dry sense of humor, making for a very enjoyable session.

I’ve already written about Dana Bauer‘s Red Balloon demo, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that it captivated the attention of everyone in the room.

My talk was basically the same talk I had given the previous month at PyCon Australia, but in a much shorter time slot: 20 minutes instead of 45! I spent much of the time before the conference consolidating my slides, and eliminating anything I could in order to cut the length of the talk. I practiced giving the session over and over, speaking as fast as I could. When the time came, I apologized in advance for the speed at which I was about to give the talk, and then blazed through it. To my surprise, I managed to finish it in 18 minutes, and had time for a few questions! Afterwards I spoke with some who attended the talk to get an idea how it seemed to them, and they didn’t feel like I skipped over anything that made it hard to follow, which was my goal when I was paring it down.

After the sessions had ended, I went with a fairly large group of people to a local restaurant. I didn’t know very many people, and those with whom I sat were all from the team in Montréal who were going to be running PyCon 2014. They started out as strangers, but by the end of the evening (and more than a few pitchers of beer!), we became friends, and I look forward to seeing them again in Montréal next April!

PyCon Canada Begins!

Today was the opening of PyCon Canada 2013, with some volunteer prep work to get things ready in the afternoon, followed by a casual mixer in the evening. This is only the second PyCon here in Canada, and it’s already grown significantly from last year’s small venue. I didn’t go to that one, but I’ve been told it was small enough to be held in a Legion hall. This year it is being held in the Chestnut Conference Centre, which is part of the University of Toronto.

The mixer was a lot of fun, with food and beverages graciously supplied by Upverter. I got to meet several people as well as connect with many others whom I had already met. Based on my small sampling, there was a good mix of seasoned Python developers and relative newcomers to the language. One of the best parts about conferences like this is learning what others are doing with the language, and there was a wide range just in the discussions that I had: some doing web development, while others focused on internal tools for their companies, while still another was working with medical research teams to analyze data.

The conference proper begins tomorrow morning, with a keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, followed by a full day of sessions. My talk isn’t until Sunday afternoon, which means that I’ll probably spend a lot of tomorrow revising my slides again and again between now and then.

A Look Back at PyCon Australia 2013

In an earlier post I reviewed the OpenStack miniconf that preceded the main PyCon, which was held in Hobart, Tasmania on July 6–7. I had meant to write this shortly after PyCon ended, but the whirlwind of travel back to the US and getting back into the daily grind pushed it off my plate.

The conference was recorded, and all the videos are available on the pyvideo.org website. I encourage you to watch as many of the sessions that interest you as you can – lots of good stuff in them!

The conference actually started for me earlier – the organizer, Chris Neugebauer, had asked for volunteers to help with the conference prep work: badges, swag, all that stuff. This was on the Wednesday before the conference, which happened to be the day I arrived, so it was as good an excuse as any to get out of my hotel and into Hobart. For those of you who have never gone to a PyCon, it is completely run by volunteers. No one gets paid; no one gets free admission; no one gets special perks. This was shocking to me when I moved from the Microsoft conference world a decade ago, where conferences were run as profit centers, and attendees paid for tickets that cost well over $1,000, but who could then relax and treat their time there as a vacation (which many did, at their employers’ expense). But PyCons are the exact opposite, and as a result everyone has a stake in the conference experience. I’ve found that volunteering not only makes you feel like you’re contributing, but it also means that you meet a lot of interesting people who might otherwise remain anonymous faces in the crowd.

PyCon AU volunteer night

The picture above is a quick snapshot I took as we carried out the task of wrapping a thousand coffee cups (yes, that’s correct: 1000) with vinyl cutouts of the coffee sponsor’s logo. Why did we do this? Because a run of pre-printed cups had a minimum of 50,000, and, well, PyCon just ain’t that big! And to make things even more fun, the logos were slightly bigger than the cup, which made it difficult to wrap cleanly. Tedious, huh? But rather than being a drag, it was a great time as the dozen or so people there had great conversations as we wrapped the cups one by one. As the only American there, and this being my first time in Australia, observations on cultural differences was a big topic, and I certainly learned a lot. We were all shocked when we were done to learn that we had spent 4 hours working on this stuff; it certainly went by much faster than that.

After the work was done, we went out to eat, where (among other things) I learned that Tasmania has a high-end distillery business that is producing spirits that rival other parts of the world, especially in the high-end whiskey area. Two of the best are the Nant and Lark distilleries. I’m not a big Scotch drinker, but I appreciated the quality that these two distilleries are producing. Unfortunately, they are relatively small, and their products are nearly impossible to find in the US.

The conference proper started off Saturday morning, with Alex Gaynor giving the keynote. It set the tone for the conference, and we spent much of the next two days exploring what it meant to be both a software developer in general, and a Pythonista in particular. I then went to Nick Coghlan’s talk about the state of Python packaging; it’s no secret that packaging has always been a pain point for Python, but it is great to see that the different efforts are now unified under Nick’s leadership.

Next up was Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s talk on security in web apps in the Python world. I was aware of most of the attack vectors thanks to my security training at Rackspace, but it was somewhat shocking to see how easy it is to expose a vulnerability if you don’t know it’s there. If you write web apps that are exposed to the public, make sure you watch the video of his talk. Now.

In the afternoon I drifted between various talks which, to be frank, varied in their appeal. That’s not to say that the content wasn’t valuable; it just wasn’t of particular interest to my work. I did end up skipping a few talks to work on my slides for my session; I don’t think I’ve ever given a talk without editing it right up to the last minute, and this was no different.

The day ended with a full hour of Lightning Talks, which are always one of my favorite parts of PyCon, and the lightning talks at PyCon AU did not disappoint. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, they are a series of short (5 minutes – enforced!) talks on whatever the speaker wants to talk about. There was a good mix of dense information, rants, product description and general wackiness. If you’ve never been to a PyCon, don’t miss the lightning talks! I didn’t take notes, but fortunately Thomas Sutton did.

One thing that was different at this PyCon was the Conference Dinner after the sessions on Saturday. All the attendees were gathered into a room with many large round tables that sat about 10 people each. There was wine and beer served, along with iced tea and soda. The food was served buffet-style, but this was no ordinary conference fare. Fresh oysters! Smoked salmon! Freshly-carved roasts! All this with an assortment of salads, vegetables, breads, and deserts. I followed my usual practice and sat at a table where I knew no one, in order to make new friends and learn about what they are doing with Python, but we ended up having much less technical discussion for some reason (big surprise!).

The evening wasn’t all food and drink, though. There was an evening keynote by Mark Pesce of MooresCloud that talked about their work integrating Raspberry Pi units to control LED displays. An example of this was used in the lightning talks to provide a visual indication of the time remaining for each speaker; as time wound down, the LEDs changed from green to yellow to red to flashing red to off. During the keynote, though, he demonstrated how the Pis could change the light display in response to a stream of Twitter hashtags, creating a virtual tug-of-war. He had half the room send tweets with one hashtag, while the other half tweeted a different hashtag, and the color distribution of the display changed in response. Apologies to anyone who follows me on Twitter for the hashtag spam that night! So while this was a somewhat silly example of what it could do, it certainly demonstrated that you could program the device to respond to any sort of dynamic data.

Sunday morning’s sessions were… ok, you got me. I skipped the sessions at the prompting of Alan Perkins, the director of our Sydney office, who grew up in Hobart and knows the area well. He wanted to take me along with a couple of other Rackers up to the peak of Mount Wellington, which is probably the most ubiquitous visual in the Hobart area. Unfortunately, being the middle of winter there, the roads were closed due to iciness. So instead Alan took us on a tour along the coastline of the Derwent estuary through some of the smaller towns and some truly gorgeous scenery.

We made it back in time for the last morning session, but I needed to prepare for my talk in the afternoon. After lunch Richard Jones gave an excellent talk entitled “Don’t Do This”, which was an exploration of some of the oddities that were possible in the Python language. Fortunately I can say that none of them could be found in my code! Next up was Dylan Lacey from Sauce Labs, with a talk on using Splinter to streamline your testing by providing an API that allows you to automate browser actions. Splinter looks pretty interesting, and if I were doing web acceptance testing, I would definitely check it out.

Next up was my session on using Python to build your application infrastructure. I won’t self-review, but I do want to thank the people who attended the talk for being understanding when the shaky hotel network caused my live demo to die halfway through. I did get a few good reviews from those who attended the talk.

After the afternoon tea break, I saw Luke Miller’s talk on developing an indie game with Python that featured a gay theme. I had never really thought about it before, but there weren’t any games that featured leading characters who were gay, and which might appeal to gay audiences more than the current selection available. The talk wasn’t just about the game’s theme; it was a very in-depth look into what it takes to develop a game and make it interesting. I must say that I learned more in that talk than in any other I attended, as the material was totally new to me, and it was presented very clearly.

The final session was by Adam Forsyth on Getting the Most Out of StackOverflow. Adam is seriously active on that site, and knows quite a bit about how things work, and how it can be overwhelming at times to a newcomer. He had many tips for those who wanted to both ask better questions that would have a good chance of receiving a great answer, as well as for those who wanted to be able to find questions to answer before others did.

Last but not least were the second day of lightning talks. Once again they were excellent, and again, Thomas Sutton took much better notes than I did.

That was the end of the conference, and Chris Neugebauer, as the conference chair, gave his closing remarks, thanking everyone from the sponsors to the attendees for making PyCon AU 2013 a truly remarkable conference. He received a standing ovation of thanks from the audience for all his hard work, and he deserved every clap.

Many people left after that, but for those of us who remained, things were not over. We had the upper level of Jack Greene’s reserved, and it was packed with Pythonistas enjoying some final food, drink, and conversation.

I’ve been to 10 PyCon US conferences, and while PyCon AU 2013 was much smaller in overall size, it matched its US counterpart in terms of spirit, content, and sense of community. Next year it moves to Brisbane, and I would certainly love to be able to return.