Published at May 19, 2015 | Tagged with: Python , Django

In a few words PyCon Sweden 2015 was awesome. Honestly, this was my first Python conference ever but I really hope it won't be the last.

Outside the awesome talks and great organisation it was really nice to spend some time with similar minded people and talk about technology, the universe and everything else. I have met some old friends and made some new ones but lets get back to the talk. Unfortunately I was not able to see all of them but here is a brief about those I saw and found really interesting:

It all started with Ian Ozsvald and his awesome talk about "Data Science Deployed" (slides / video). The most important point here were:

log everything

think about data quality, don't use everything just what you need

think about turning data into business values

start using your data

Then Rebecca Meritz talked about "From Explicitness to Convention: A Journey from Django to Rails" (slides / video). Whether the title sounds a bit contradictive this was not the usual Django vs Rails talk. At least to me it was more like a comparison between the two frameworks, showing their differences, weak and strong sides. Whether I am a Django user, I am more and more keen to the position that none of the frameworks is better than the other one, they are just two different approaches for building great web apps.

Flavia Missi and "Test-Driven-Development with Python and Django" (slides / video). TDD will help you have cleaner, better structured and easy to maintian code. If you are not doing it the best moment to start is now. Whether it is hard at the beginning you will pretty soon realise how beneficial it is. Especially if someone pushed a bad commit and the tests saved your ass before the code goes to production.

Later Dain Nilsson talked about "U2F: Phishing-proof two-factor authentication for everyone" (video). Whether I don't use two-factor authentication at the moment I am familiar with the concept and I really like it. The U2F protocol looks like a big step towards making it more applicable over different tools and applications and the key holding devices are more and more accessible nowadays. Maybe it is time for me to get one )))

The second day started with Kate Heddleston who talked about ethics in computer programming (video). About how social networks can be used as a tool for ruining peoples lifes and that we as a developers should take a responsibility and work towards making the internet a safer place for everyone. A place where you can have your privacy and have protection if harassed. It is a big problem which won't be solved in a night, but talking about it is the first step towards solving it.

"Why Django Sucks" by Emil Stenström. Don't rush into raging cause this was one of best talks at the conference. Emil showed us the parts in Django where he sees flaws and that need improvement. The main point was the lack of common template language between Django and Javascript and what possible solutions are available or can be made.

Daniele Sluijters reminded us how easy is to work with "Puppet and Python" (video). No more fighting with Ruby, you can easily use your favorite language to build your own tools and helpers

Dennis Ljungmark and "Embedded Python in Practice". The last time I programmed embedded devices was 15 years ago as a part of short course in the high school. Dennis' work is much more complex than what I did then but his talk reminded me of things that are applicable to general programming. Whether using non-embedded systems we often have much more memory and processing power available that does not mean that we should waste it. So think when you code - RAM is not endless and processors are not that fast as we often wish. Also don't forget that Exceptions wil sooner or later occur so make your code ready to handle them.

"How to Build a Python Web Application with Flask and Neo4j" (video) by Nicole White. Well I have heard about Neo4J, but I have never used it or seen it in action so this one was really exciting. Neo4J offers you a whole new perspective about building databases and relations between objects but it is much far from panacea. Actually I can see it it is more like a special tool then as a general replacement of a relation database but it still worths to be tried. Oh, and the Neo4J browser - totally awesome.

In the lightning talks Tome Cvitan talked about Faker. If you are still not familiar with it now is a good time to try it. Especially if you are writing tests.

At the final Kenneth Reitz told us about "Python for Humans"(video). About the not that obvious things in Python and what solutions are out there. And also about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python! a great place for beginners and not only and shared the idea to make Python easier and more welcoming by introducing better tools for higher level of operations.

Finally I want to thank to everyone - the organisers, the speakers, the audience and practically everyone who was a part of the conference. Without you it would be the same (or be at all). Thanks, keep up the good work and hopefully we will sea each other again.

P.S. Have I mentioned that the whole conference was recorded on video so hopefully we will see be able to see all the talks pretty soon. I will try to keep this post updated with the links to the videos and/or slides when they become available. Of course if you know about any published slides from the conference that are not linked here please let me know.

The full set of videos are available at PyCon Sweden's Youtube channel.