PyTennessee 2017

I was really excited about the chicken mixed with onions and peppers for breakfast. It was exactly what I wanted this morning. I'm sick this weekend which means I'm hopped up on naproxen right now to survive day two here at PyTennessee. Unfortunately this means I'm also hallucinating. That wasn't chicken. It was sweet potato. It was an extremely disappointing reality to discover.

Looking back at last year I'm glad I came to this again, and I can see why. I learn a lot and am forced to socialize in spite of myself. Especially when I am sick I am not a social butterfly. To start off the day I just sat in the back of the keynote room eating that which was not chicken. Eventually the girl I sat next to here yesterday joined me again. We don't talk much except to watch eachother's computer when one of us leaves the room. When the auditorium is full someone I know will likely come grab the seat next to me and we'll chat a bit. At least that kept happening yesterday. I can't really hide.

The morning keynote was Sophie Rapoport from Eventbrite. She talked about writing an OS. And a place called the Recurse Center where she learned some things. Threads. Kernals. Sleep.

I meant to read The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python before this weekend, but I didn't. Some small amends, I suppose, was made by attending Kenneth Reitz's talk on developer burnout. I think what he's really describing is social media burnout, that is, overengaging with a community. Reitz delegates engagement of his github projects to stay sane.

After that I got enspired to start tracking conferences that I've submitted CFPs for and created a repository for it during the lunch/lightning talks. And submitted a talk I've been thinking about for DEVit in May. I'm debating whether to back populate it with submissions that failed from last year, but that was kind of disheartening so I'm not sure I will. Although it would be good to have a record of what doesn't work easily accessible.

After lunch was Derik Pell's talk on functional programming. Interestingly this was another talk that wasn't exactly about python. In fact there wasn't any code at all for the first half of the talk. He merely opined about the advantages of functional programming: immutable data, map-reduce, function composition, lambdas, etc. Then he dove into a Jupyter notebook and showed how the concepts can be applied in python.

Next was Jason Orendorff's look at writing a search engine in python (gist). Parse. Index. Query. Show. The theory was that we could all write a search engine during his talk.

... hopefully he'll post the code afterward.

Deployment was the subject of Cindy Sridharan's talk which I attended next. Wheels are code binaries for distribution which are new to me. Pex files are python executables (developed at Twitter). She also talked about good old virtualenv and how docker containers are now better. I think. The talk was very French. Then she talked about conda and nix, which have some overlap with eachother and the other aforementioned tools.