PyCon 2023 – Talks impressions (DigHum #1)#

July 24, 2023

What happened in Florence needs some further reflection I started this newsletter as a way to develop the book that originated this newsletter. Then I changed job, and a lot is happening. As a result, plans for this newsletter were halted. I tried to start gearing up with writing newsletters with this other one, and, well, it is going.

(That’s me grabbing PyCon IT website image, watch the whole thing from there!)

There I had the occasion to delve into some programming-related random things, i.e. discussing PyCon together with Academia in my other newsletter (the one I actually managed to work more on). I’ll link the piece below.

This current newsletter is a pt. 2 of the PyCon discussion, this time trying to reconstruct the days and the talks.

Random Access Thoughts Patterns On Pycon: Tech conferences and Academia conference (RATP #9) I have been to Pycon Italia last week (actually, end of May. You never know when drafts will be put online). My company brought me there (thanks) and it was a blast. Quite demanding on the physical and logistical side (this parenthesis exploded on first writings. You’ll find it as a dedicated section… Read more 6 months ago · 1110sillabo (That was the old one)

At the end of the day, I guess this should offer extra reasons to consider attending big programming conferences. By the way, the talks should be available on the website.

I basically went through the website of the conference and tried to reconstruct my days. (Blame Substack not incorporating markdown for lack of more detailed links to the talks.)

Open Source for the long-haul, Carlton Gibson

Hell of a performance. FDR’s quote was mentioned in the other newsletter. harsh take on companies using open-source software while donating zero. Use of open software as something helping career and learning.

Emphasis on the mental toll of being a maintainer of big projects.

(Mental health was part of the conference. The talk reminded me of some of the vibes I got from Working in Public The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, though this requires further unpacking.)

The first impact with the “hey, you can meet maintainers”. They exist!

Coding to interfaces: Structural Subtyping in Python, Francesco Panico, Carlo Bertini

My colleagues’ talk. It turns out typing will be a hot topic later and that in subsequent talks that talk had been referenced. Warning: the talk’s title is in English, the talk was in Italian (so you won’t be angry with me if you watch the talk recording 🙂 ).

Serverless from scratch with CI/CD on AWS: it’s a lot easier than you think (and mostly free), Dom Weldon

There are a lot of resources on config files I did not know about. Great job managing the talk with the projector failing many times.

Robyn: A fast async Python web framework with a Rust runtime, Sanskar Jethi

My first “story of a framework” talk. Rust was very popular at this Python conference.

The talk was rescheduled and repeated. Framework was named because that makes the author a Batman.

Pessimism, optimism, realism and Django database concurrency, Aivars Kalvāns

Spotted the talk from the plan. Bumped into the author for lunch. So I had to go. First “know your db well, and know the internals of how your ORM handles it better” talk.

Help! I Need To UnSQLize My Application, Joel Lord

I went into db mood and stood in the room for the other half of the session. Turns out Joel Lord is a developer advocate from Mongo so – yes – at conferences, you can even meet professionals doing fancy professions that are not widely advocated (ups, could not resist) in your country.

This talk got me one of the quotes of the PyCon.

“I’m paid to say no” was the top honest answer to a question about having found a situation in which NoSQL did something in a Python-related context that could have not been done with SQL database.

(In the meantime, colleagues said a lot of good things about this parallel talk The hitchhiker’s guide to asyncio, Fabbiani)

Develop modern games in Python the old-school way, Di Scala

Blast from the past of old looking videogames and the tools they were developed with. We went back to when resources were not super abundant and you had to be wise and smart. The take home message: games are a fun way to re-discover some programming techniques.

(Reworking my way through the calendar led me to this talk on pythonizing slides which looks pretty cool).

The CPU in your browser: WebAssembly demystified, Antonio Cuni

Never heard this before talk, pt 1/n. Impressive talk with live demo on WebAssembly

Rust is easy, Luca Baggi

Extremely accurate talk. There’s a lot you can learn in presenting a talk from this one. From the way you wear (head back to the video) to picking a great title.

Luca coded along with the audience demonstrating Rust is super user-friendly. He did that without knowing Rust (at least that’s what he said). In doing so he pointed out to cool things he’d be glad to see in Python.

Wow!

Also, super important for this newsletter, he did not go through the “standard tech” path but started in economics. That is not 100% Digital Humanities, maybe. But if you need inspiration, there you go.

No Holds Barred Web Framework Battle, Daniel Roy Greenfeld

“Meet the author of a book you’ve read” talk. PyDanny comparing web frameworks – Flask, Django, FastAPI (another popular topic there). Learnt about the Pinterest hack and how having built-in form validation may help you out.

5 Things about fastAPI I wish we had known beforehand, Alexander Hendorf & What does Starlette really do for FastAPI?, Marcelo Trylesins

(Aka, the FastAPI and Starlette session)

This was my FastAPI session, with FastAPI being another hot topic during the conference, at least from my perspective. The speakers interacted in between talks.

Marcelo’s talk was one of the first “talk from a maintainer on the maintained repo”. The walk through of the work Starlette does for FastAPI was interesting and impressive.

Stay Curious: Reflections on Passion, Risk-Taking, and Re-Invention, Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel

Meet a Python core developer talk. A life journey on what the impact of COVID was on programmers. And, again, a keynote heavily dedicated to mental health and general well-being.

Running your Django WebAuthN service, Sagie Shamay

Presentation of the work in progress for WebAuthN, an interesting hands-on approach on authentication in Django.

Is the great dataframe showdown finally over? Enter: polars, Luca Baggi

Luca’s previous talk got me and I could not avoid attending this one.

This one was a presentation on Polars, a dataframe tools. (Main comparison was with Panda).

restest – Il coltellino svizzero per i test di endpoint REST in Python, Fabio Rotondo

The talk presented an instrument to test the response on endpoints that fell outside of our control (or that are ours and we’d like to test). It was partly a live demo of the tool and an explaination of how it works. Really interesting.

Fun facts. The tool was improved on the day of the talk. At the end of the talk Fabio asked to star the repository as the project has been under development for a few years but only had a star. Someone in the audience said “it was 10 when I’ve added mine” and then it felt like an auction 12… 14… Nice.

(A talk did not make it to the list. It was about GitLab pipelines. I was not able to get it from the website.)

Hope this prompts you to watch some of the talks, joining a Python conference or proposing a paper! 🙂