Slides from my PyCodeConf presentation

Many thanks to Github and friends for hosting PyCodeConf in Miami this year. Normally I don't like conferences, and I imagined I wouldn't like Miami either but I was proven completely wrong on both counts. Call it low expectations, but hey, they delivered!

I quite like the way my presentation turned out. It has real actual facts (tm) including two benchmarks where Java loses to python in literally every possible way. This isn't that surprising - since I hate java, I like python, and I wrote the benchmarks - but my angst was somewhat increased since I had been actually trying on purpose to make a biased benchmark that Java would pass in order to make myself appear more well-balanced... and I completely failed. I was not able to make java appear better than python in any way, be it startup time, memory usage, code execution time, library power, or source code readability. This is surely some kind of perverse marketing gimmick: since it's actually literally impossible to make a benchmark that makes java look good, then everyone who publishes java benchmarks automatically looks biased, so java lovers can discount the opinion of the "haters." Insidious.

But enough with the conspiracy theories. Here are Avery's slides from pycodeconf in pdf form including some detailed speaker notes. I thought about giving them to you in Google Docs format, but naturally Docs is totally incapable of showing speaker notes by default, so forget it. Just open the pdf already. I put a lot of work into the notes so you wouldn't have to try to learn from my (rather sparse) slides.

Oh yeah, what's it actually about? My experiences writing fast code (like bup and sshuttle) in python. And how it's possible. And how not to do it.

One audience member said, "I thought about 40% of it was really insightful. The other 60% I had no idea what you were talking about." I consider that a rave review, I think.

Update 2011/10/18: They posted an audio recording of my talk. Also check out the other recorded talks and slides.