PyCon CZ - Day 2

Sum­ma­ry of the sec­ond day of Py­con CZ 2017.

At 10:00 it was time for the first talk: a key­note ti­tled What lies ahead? Python’s fu­ture strenghts and main chal­lenges. It was a great talk, I re­al­ly en­joyed the re­marks of a Python­ista re­mem­ber­ing thins from ear­ly Python con­fer­ences. The main con­clu­sion that I took from the pre­sen­ta­tion was that, even in the ear­ly days there were some re­al­ly tough chal­lenges to over­come (for ex­am­ple the use of in­den­ta­tion, script­ing, etc.), and Python sur­mount­ed it. These chal­lenges were, per­haps even big­ger than to­day’s ones (de­bates about Python 2/3, etc.), which makes me think that cur­rent is­sues don’t jeop­ar­dize the fu­ture of Python at al­l, so the com­mu­ni­ty and the lan­guage will get through them. Re­al­ly in­spir­ing, and en­gag­ing.

Then it was the time for my new talk Dis­cov­er­ing De­scrip­tors. I got some in­ter­est­ing ques­tions from the au­di­ence, and on gen­er­al I had a good time pre­sent­ing, so that was an­oth­er good ex­pe­ri­ence. Af­ter the pre­sen­ta­tion, while do­ing some net­work­ing, I got good feed­back about it, and was asked about the source for it, which I made pub­lic.

Then I at­tend­ed some is­sues, took a look at the chal­lenges, and af­ter lunch, I lis­tened to Armin Ronacher’s talk, ti­tled A Python and Rust love sto­ry, which was an­oth­er won­der­ful talk. I re­al­ly en­joy these kind of poly­glot talk­s, be­cause that’s the true spir­it of soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture (what this blog is about): to find the best tool (lan­guage) for the prob­lem at hand, which might not al­ways be Python. So it’s in­ter­est­ing to see how oth­er lan­guages can com­ple­ment our so­lu­tion, in in­ter­est­ing ways. I learnt more about the build­ing and pack­ag­ing sys­tem of Rust, and the code snip­pets were a good way to get a first im­pres­sion of the lan­guage. Def­i­nite­ly some­thing to in­ves­ti­gate fur­ther.

On the chal­lenges I did rea­son­ably well, and I got the book Open­Shift for de­vel­op­ers from the stand of Red Hat, which was nice. I’ll read it on the flight back.

Then there was an­oth­er good talk called build­ing an al­go­rith­mic trad­ing plat­form in Python 3, which left me with some li­braries to in­ves­ti­gate, name­ly aiokaf­ka, and fas­tavro. Dis­trib­uted sys­tems are a fun­da­men­tal con­cept of soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture, so this is ab­so­lute­ly rel­e­vant and in­ter­est­ing for the pur­pose of this blog.

The last talk of the day was about optimizing Python code with cython which is a really nice tool I definitely recommend.

Then it came the time for light­ning talk­s, and out of all of them, the one that grabbed my at­ten­tion the most was one about HTTP 0.9 (yes 0.9!), be­cause it briefly (re­mem­ber light­ning), ex­plained the pro­to­col on this ver­sion and most im­por­tant­ly, it point­ed to this pre­sen­ta­tion that I will def­i­nite­ly study. Af­ter the light­ning talks ses­sion, I had the priv­i­lege to talk­ing to the speak­er (Ana), and had a re­al­ly in­ter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion about HTTP 2.0, and tech­nolo­gies alike. Post re­lat­ed to this might come in the fu­ture.

All in all I think it was a great day full of learn­ing, food for thought, and things to re­search fur­ther. To­mor­row is work­shops and sprints day, so I look for­ward to prac­tis­ing on Elas­tic­Search, and Ku­ber­netes with Open­Shift.