Swiss Python Summit |
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21 September 2023 - Rapperswil
Getting back into conferences was not as hard as I espected. The ecosystem seems to have gotten healthy again, although maybe not back to pre-covid levels though. Today I am at the Swiss Python Summit. As expected, my eyes were opened to new ideas and old ones I hadn't thought about in a while.
Marco Eilers of ETH gave the first talk on Nagini, the project he's working on. It uses specifications to verfiy algorithms. The demo didn't work, and it seems like it's still very beta but an interesting idea. It requires Python's type annotations which I have not used. I like the quick and dirtiness of dynamically typed Python, but having seen how much better for production systems TypeScript is over JavaScript.
Teresa Kubacka, also of ETH, is a former physicist turned data scientist. That sounds familiar! She talked about some tricks for using Matplotlib, which I haven't played with in years. In web development the frontend handles visualizations so JavaScript's D3 is my goto. Starting to realize how outside the python ecosystem I've been the past few years.
Next Mirko Galimberti (Not ETH! Was getting worried they would all be.) talked about Kivy, which is used to write crossplatform apps for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. A fast moving sales pitch.
The CPython compiler was the topic of Sadhana Srinivasan (another data scientist)'s talk, which came next. She gave a nice simple explanation of how Python is interpreted and run by C.
Christian Heitzmann believes in documentation and his talk was about arguing how important it is. Documentation debt leads to employees spending most of their time reverse engineering in the long term. His company, SimplexaCode, is a consulting firm that companies pay to retire their documentation debt. For Python he recommends using docstrings in reStructuredText and processed by Sphinx for documentation.
After lunch Robin Ehrensperger of OST brought a Boston Dynamics dogbot to show us how he's used their Python SDK to implement voice control of the robot.
The final talk was Quazi Nafiul Islam's excellent history of web frameworks. Well, Python ones. And it wasn't the final talk of the day, but I had to catch a train to Delémont where I'm running a race tomorrow that's actually in the Jura Canton unlike the Jura Swiss Trail which I ran earlier this year that's actually in Vaud.
