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 strengths 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{.interpreted-text role="doc"}. 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.