PyTennessee 2017

Today I find myself again at PyTennessee. Python people are just really nice. And they have this cheap conference in Nashville. Last year I attended with Maxwell, but this year I'm solo. Lots of people here are in from out of town, but lots of local people are here, too. I know a lot of them.

Sarah Guido gave the first keynote talk about getting involved and avoiding burnout. Networking, networking, networking!

The second talk I attended was Jon Banafato's on pip, python's package management tool. I learned some things about it that I didn't know. For example with the freeze command command I can generate a requirements.txt which shows all the random packages I've played with on this computer, including the Sizzle SDK skeleton I made way back when but never registered. I've included it here for posterity to laugh at later. Because I have a lot of shit installed globally, a faux pas and great way to break things if I have different requirements in different codebases I'm using. I took some notes in a gist:

During lunch (pork sandwiches) there were lightning talks about data quality, Rust, the xpath library, a new pip file format to replace requirements.txt, being the only dev at a company, citizenship, a penny university and the practice of presenting.

After lunch I listened to Kevin Najimi talk trading algorithms. My Python experience started with the QSTK in a Coursera class from GA Tech in 2014, so it was nice to get back to market modeling. Najimi uses Quantopian, which is an iPython notebook environment which can be hooked up to an actual brokerage account. Apparently traders used to model in R or Matlab and then build production code in C++, but Python can now be used for the whole process. Bad ass!

Then it was Jesse Davis's talk (old recording) on coroutines in Python. The async/await paradigm is one thats making its way into languages (coming soon to JavaScript as well) so I wanted to see how Python 3 incorporates this new feature. Threads fail at 10s of thousands of them. That is, even though they don't block while waiting for i/o, there are only so many of them available. This is the use case for async/await in Python.

Jared Smith's talk on PySpark was the next thing I tried to insert into my fried brain. Smith is a fellow Vol currently in grad school there and working at Oak Ridge. His talk was really disorganized. But he got a lot of laughs. Especially after his rant about cross platform implementation of emojis. I talked to him afterward and got a chuckle when I learned he also left physics after working with Stefan Spanier.

After dinner Zara & Maxwell joined me for game night at Emma, where Zara managed to win a game!