PyTennessee 2016

Saturday

This weekend was PyTennessee, a conference for users of the programming language Python. Confession: I am not a regular Python user. Being a low priced ($50) local tech event though, I figured it was worth signing up for and if a waste of time I could just throw away. I have not been disappointed, and find myself here on Sunday again for the second day.

Maxwell joined me yesterday for "Young Coders", a daylong Python bootcamp for 12-18 year olds. It was his first experience with a scripting language, so, as you can imagine, he loved the short feedback loop compared to Java. He loved it A LOT. This morning when I left he was busy programming on his new laptop. Yeah, the free event for kids included a shiny new laptop: a Chromebook partitioned with Ubuntu also installed and setup with Minecraft pre-installed. If you have talked to a 7-16 year old in the past few years, then maybe you don't know how big Minecraft is. For many kids these days Minecraft is the platform for creation in the digital world. It has aptly been compared to Legos. You know, those plastic building blocks Google built their first server with.

As I mentioned, Maxwell was immediately favorably disposed toward Python because of his Java experience. Last year he and I took an O'Reilly webinar about Minecraft, which is written in Java. If you want to spin up your own Minecraft server, modify the rules of the world, and invite your friend to log in and play, then Java seems the logical route to go. So I spun him up a server (an EC2 instance on AWS) and set him loose. He got the server running and was really into it! But.... everytime more than a friend or two logged in it crashed. Then Maxwell smashed his computer and didn't have access to it for a while. So the project fell into abeyance.

So yesterday Maxwell got a book on learning to progam Minecraft with Python and spent the day with other Minecraft-obsessed teenagers learning to wield more powers in a world they already know and love. Magical.

Meanwhile I found myself a n00b in the world of Python. Expecting the conference to be mostly about the language and its associated tools, I was surprised to find so much of it was generally applicable. And touchy feely. Arienne Lowe asked me if I meant that as a good thing after her keynote. Which was oddly meta since her talk was about being authentic and some of her own insecurities in her growth as a programmer. Saturday began with Lars Lohn, a Mozilla programmer / organic farmer, treating us to a musical performance. This in an expictly Douglas Hofstadter way evolved into a discussion of fractals, mentorship and personal growth. Yeah, there was a little Python in there, but it could have be pseudocode for all its importance to the story.

Next I went to a talk more in line with my expections. Marcus Fulbright, who became a friend after I tried unseccesfully to hire him, gave a talk on the AWS Lambda tool - basically functions that can be triggered by AWS events or via an HTTP gateway. It's cool if you need to spin up a lot of things in parallel and don't want to manage the servers at all. And be at Amazon's mercy in their environment choices outside of memory whether it runs Python, Node or Java. But you can't even choose the version it runs! Thinking about how I just escaped Google App Engine's PHP 5.5 I'm not ready to jump back into that. Always tradeoffs there are.

Lunch was beef brisket. I met back up with Maxwell. He had been too excited to eat breakfast, but I did convince him to have lunch. He'd also had a lot of soda by that point. Then he went back into Minecraft land and I went to lightning talks. This included more music from Lars and an interesting insight from Katie Cunningham regarding CSS: writing it correctly improves the accessiblity of websites for the disabled by leaps and bounds. Confession: the site you're know reading is nearly devoid of CSS and uses tables for formating, a bete noire of Cunningham.

"Snakes on a Rocket" was the title of the first talk after lunch, ostensibly about Python usage in NASA's avionics simulations. It was actually mostly some NASA facts with humorous meme references wrapped around them. There were a few diagrams of their server architecture, but not really any Python.

Scott Sanderson's talk Unspeakably Evil Hacks in Service of Marginally Improved Syntax taught me more about Python the language than I learned anywhere else in the conference.

Hello Web App (Part I), wherein I learned about Django setup and submitted a pull request.

Before the final keynote I met back up with Maxwell. He was glowing with pride of his newfound programming prowess.

Adrienne Lowe gave the final keynote of the day on being authentic. It was pretty touchy-feely, but dovetailed nicely with I was realizing was the overarching theme of the conference: soft skills. These are just as needed in the PHP and javascript worlds just as much as in the Python world.

Rootbeer Floats & Game Night

Guillotine was the first game we played. The idea is you're competing executioners during the French Revolution trying to score the highest ranking nobles. Maxwell & I played just the two of us. Then we got rootbeer floats. They even had coconut ice cream for Maxwell!

Pit was the next game we played, joining a group already playing it. There were eight players, so it was a pretty crazy game with everybody yelling at once trying to corner the market in a particular resource.

We had to leave the pit early to pick up Brittan at the airport. She was returning from a weekend at Purdue where she was interviewing for grad school. She liked the people and said she felt at home there, which was great to hear!

Sunday

Sunday morning began, after breakfast, with more Katie Cunningham: How Writing Harry Potter Fanfic Can Improve Your Documentation. Or something like that. I wish Alora had been there. I never realized how all the writing I do in my free time (journalling, this blog, poetry, the occassional fiction) makes me a better documentor at work. Not sure why I never put two and two together there.

In between talks I overheard a woman talking to a Vanderbilt researcher about this grad student she'd met at Geek Girl Dinner. She remembered Cara as having been in neuroscience rather than immunology, but my physical description matched - she most remembered Cara's big smile. Then it turned out the researcher, who had left physics for biomechanical engineering, also did his grad work at SLAC (but back in the SLC days) and knew my UT people from CMS. Small world!

"Duck, Duck, Møøse" was the title of Brian Costlow's talk on duck typing. Takeaway: duck typing also works on humans.

Lightning talks Lars Lohn did another lightning talk - this one on the mazes he likes to draw. Fernando talked about bilingual programming. San Diego people talked about starting communities. Daniel from RethinkDB tried a live example, demonstrating the perils thereof when it errored out. Still want to go their meetup tomorrow though. One of the Quicksilver developers demoed that tool. Brian Costlow talked about PyOhio. A HS sophmore who does research at Vanderbilt talked about reproducing vection in virtual reality. Another Harpeth Hall student talked about getting girls excited about coding & looking for speakers. I got her email. Last was a guy talking about his blog.

Writing CLIs with Dave Forgac kind of excited me because I'm an old command line guy. Submitted a somewhat troll pull request during his talk but I learned a lot. Not sure exactly when I would use this instead bash scripting, but it was neat nonetheless.

Hello Web App (Part II), wherein I got a basic templated Django website up and running locally.

The final keynote was Brian Dailey, who extoled us to be good people more than good coders.

Coda

Next week I'm giving a talk at the PHP meetup, Why the Hell Aren't You Using Composer Already?!, and I'm hoping the experience of this weekend will make that talk better. We shall see. They generally post video...