Well, I’ve made it to another conference (they are even letting me present at this one).  I was in Nashville for PyTenessee.  I love Python, and this is a great conference and community to be a part of .

 

Keynote: The Importance of Community and Networking, by Sarah Guido (@sarah_guido)

I watched Sarah the first time I went to PyTennessee two years ago, and she had one of my favorite talks about data science.  This time, she was talking a bit about her personal journey, from classically trained trumpet player in college, to a senior data scientist at Mashable.   She gave some great tips of how to give back to the community (starting meetups, going to meetups, slack channels, open source contributions) and gave some great tips to avoiding burnout.

 

What’s in your pip toolbox? by Jon Banafato (@jonafato)

So I was trying to figure out a lightning talk, so I didn’t pay too close attention to this one, but what I did get out of it was something I’m going to go use at work.  I knew most of the pip requirements.txt information, but I learned about pip-compile and pipdeptree.  Pip-compile was nice as it helped you with a requirements.txt file based on the libraries you import, not giving you anything extraneous.   pipdeptree was a great tool to show  where your dependencies in pip are coming from.

 

Lunch Lightning Talks

There were a series of 5 minute lightning talks.  I decided thirty minutes before them that I’d write a unit test talk.  However, I fought with Linux windowing twice and never got it going :(.

Other talks were things like pipenv, xpath, and Rust community.

 

A brief introduction to concurrence and coroutines by Eric Appelt (@appeltel)

This was probably my favorite talk.  Eric did a good job with easy to understand examples, and walked through iteration, generators, and then to the new async/await syntax in Python 3.5.  I learned a lot through this, but I don’t know if I’ll get to asyncio stuff at ADTRAN.  It is in 3.5 only (we’re using legacy Python only), and it has a bit of a viral effect.

 

Let’s Build A Hash Table, In C by Jacques Woodcock (@jacqueswoodcock)

This one was alright.  I knew C pretty well, and I’ve written hash tables before, so I didn’t learn a whole lot new.  The slides were pretty good, though.

 

Big data Analysis In Python with Apache Spark, Pandas, and Matplotlib by Jared M. Smith (@jaredthecoder)

This was another great talk.  I heard Jared on Software Engineering Daily a few weeks ago, and liked that episode.  I saw his picture in the PyTN bios and recognized it and decided to go to his talk.  It was a bonus that it was about data science.  I’ve been to a few meetups where Spark was talked about, but Jared gave a good example of how to actually use it.  The Pandas and Matplotlib part felt a little tacked on, but it was good to mention it (I probably feel this way because I knew what he talked about.)  I wish we could have saw some more examples.

 

Keynote: Humaning is Hard by Courey Eliot (@dev_branch)

This was a short, but very honest talk about privilege, disabilities, mentoring, community and helping people in need.  She held everyone’s attention, and it was refreshing to see such a candid talk on such a tough subject.