Hello folks, Registered for PyCon 2013 as usual and attended the day 1 sessions today. Before anything, a big thanks and sincere congratulations to the team that has made this event possible. The venue was excellent, acoustics far better than the previous years, and the food was really good 🙂 . The organisers have really ensured that the quality of the talks is much better compared the last year. Though I am not complaining, somehow, I think it could have been better. My over all assessment – The talks ranged from average to good. There were neither any exceptional nor frustrating talks.
Started the day off with an (Surprisingly fast) IRCTC ticket booking, and then proceeded to the pycon venue with Guruprasad. BTW, for the sake of bragging rights, my company was one of the gold sponsors of the event this year:). We were late by about 45 minutes and so missed the key note by Kiran of HasGeek. Then started the sessions. I attended the sessions on “Chugging Flask”, ZeroMQ, “Graph Everything”, “Integration of Real-Time Communication in Websites”, Ansible and “Cloud Robotics”.
Of the six, the ones on Flask and Cloud robotics can be classified “very good”. The session on ansible was average. The other two sessions weren’t really good/impressive. There was absolutely no technical content in the session on “Integration of Real-Time Communication in websites”. The speaker kept talking about “keeping the customers visiting your website interested”, did a chat and a Video chat. Not really useful. The session on “Graph Everything” was quite dull, probably because the presenter is not used to presenting stuff in public. It might have served as a decent “How To” had it been in written form.
Now to the better talks…. The first session on “Chugging Flask” can’t be really classified as a demo of anything. But the speaker was sharing his experiences of building apps with RESTful APIs using a bunch of technologies including Flask, Redis, requests etc. The talks was a bunch of suggestions on modules and libraries that we should probably be looking at if we are creating an app with RESTful API. The last session of the day was on “Cloud Robotics”. I have to confess that I don’t know anything about robotics and so most of it was difficult to follow. But even to a total outsider like me, his session was pretty good and interesting – It covered the hardware, software and the complete architecture in a complete and clear way. Kudos to the speaker. The Ansible talk was more of an introduction to the tool than a demonstration of all the capabilities of the tool. The speaker showed how to create plays/playbooks and how to use ansible in a basic sense. It might have been a good talk for someone who is looking at configuration management for the first time.
We have Kenneth Reitz key note address tomorrow morning and following that I could see a few promising sessions like “Predicting Blackswan events” and “Python for Penetration testers”. Just hoping that the sessions are really nice and interesting. Will summarize tomorrow as well 🙂 Thanks