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!