I recently attended PyCon UK, the UK’s only national conference for the Python programming language. For the second year in a row the conference was held at the Techno Centre in Coventry, where this is conveniently located just 10 minutes walk from Coventry train station. In 2011 the PyCon UK conference was for two days and had 179 attendees, whereas this year the conference had grown to four days (Fri Sept 28th – Mon Oct 1st) and had 235 attendees. These four days incorporated development sprints as well as presentations, with the majority of the sprints taking place on the Monday. The conference had five parallel sessions on all four days and also provided a canteen, free lunches and a mezzanine balcony with comfortable sofas for chilling out. Unlike many other conferences I’ve attended where coffee is only provided during particular break times, the Techno Centre had several coffee machines providing free coffee all day.
The first day of the conference was quieter than the weekend days, due to many people being unable to get the day off work to attend. Conference organisers @zeth0 and @JohnPinner gave an opening speech welcoming conference attendees and thanking the many sponsors. Next up in the main conference room was Jacob Hallen with a guide to development sprints. As there were several sprints taking place over the four days, this was a well-chosen early session. Jacob Hallen has taken part in several sprints for the PyPy project, so was able to speak from experience and provide useful advice. This advice included ensuring that all attendees have their machines and development environments ready prior to arrival at the sprint, and that the topics for the sprint should be settled by email before arrival. Other useful advice included ensuring that sprint hosts make all attendees welcome so as not to discourage new sprint participants, to take a day’s break if sprinting for more than two days, and to perform the sprint wrap-up by email afterwards, so that participants leaving early do not disturb those who are staying later.
My next session was an all-day session entitled “Test-Driven Development with Django using Selenium” and was led by @hjwp from Python Anywhere. This was an interactive coding session that did not assume any prior knowledge of TDD, Django or Selenium. @hjwp is an enthusiastic speaker and after dividing the session attendees into pairs of mixed experiences, guided them through a well-paced tutorial. After lunch I then spent a couple of hours in another all-day session by @JohnPinner on intermediate Python. @JohnPinner showed the session attendees Python concepts such as list comprehensions, lambdas, closures and a great video by @nedbat from PyCon US 2012 called “Pragmatic Unicode or how do I stop the Pain?”“. A conference social was organised on the Friday evening at a local bar and drinks were provided by Python Anywhere, although I was unable to attend this.
The second day of the conference had a higher attendance and provided hot sausage and bacon breakfast rolls for the attendees. @zeth0 again did the introduction talk, where he asked all teachers in the audience to raise their hands, then threw apples to them. This year’s conference had a strong education theme, with a teaching resources sprint led by @ntoll on the Sunday and several teachers in attendance, including the uber-enthusiastic @teknoteacher and @MissPhilbin.
The first talk of Saturday was a plenary by @asbradbury from the Raspberry Pi foundation entitled “Raspberry Pi: The Software Story”. At PyCon UK 2011 Raspberry Pi was a forthcoming project that people were eagerly anticipating, whereas the Raspberry Pi has now been on sale for 7 months and has sold almost 500,000 units. @asbradbury talked of the development of the Raspberry Pi project, design choices made for the device and made a plea for geeks to continue contributing with cool projects for the Raspberry Pi. He mentioned user groups and communities such as Young Rewired State and RaspberryJam, as well as revealing that a future educational release is planned for the Raspberry Pi.
After the plenary was the start of the parallel sessions and I chose to attend “Scenario testing of fuzzy error handling using Jython” by Fredrik Haard. He presented how error handling of multiple error types was handled in a Jython application, including managing the potential loss of a GSM connection. I then saw “Tools for Writing Tests” by Jonathan Fine, where he recommended to use pure functions as often as possible for ease of testing. Next up was a talk by Vladimir Keleshev on “Creating beautiful command-line interfaces with Python”. This talk began with an example of the deficiencies of the optparse and argparse libraries for command-line argument parsing, then an introduction to the docopt library. docopt conforms to the POSIX standard for command-line input, has been ported to PHP, Ruby, Lua, Bash and C, and the entire library only has 384 lines of code. This was one of my favourite talks of the conference and was well received by attendees.
After this I attended a talk by @andreacrotti on “Decorators and context managers”. This talk had multiple code examples, including using a context manager for writing to a file and a decorator for memoisation caching in Fibonacci sequence calculation. The final talk I saw before lunch was then “Types and classes in Python and JavaScript” by Jonathan Fine, where he showed how Python code could be written in a way that matched the prototypal inheritance characteristics of JavaScript.
The next talk after lunch was “The DjangoPi Project” by @phalt_, which is an attempt to use the RaspberryPi as a Django web server. @phalt_ described how he had attempted to create a lightweight Django web server to cope with the low resources of the RaspberryPi, and that he intended to use DjangoPi as a tool for teaching web server creation to school kids. After this I attended “Minimalism in Software Development” by Fredrik Haard. He gave a forthright and controversial talk that advised to be very wary of using frameworks, due to potential lack of understanding of the framework and dependency on external code.
Following this came an hour session of lightning talks, chaired by the compere Lightning Talk Man. PyCon UK lightning talks are strictly limited to 5 minutes each and consist of both interesting ideas and comedy talks. First up was @russel_winder on “Mutable shared-memory multi-threading is a tool of the unable”, then came the set of build and deployment tools dye. Following this came a talk on mypy, a Python framework that combines both static and dynamic typing, then a lightning talk on a Python tool for musical tuning theory. @qwertyface also gave a lightning talk on OTE-IDE, a proposal of his for a common standard of features available for all Python IDEs, to reduce IDE configuration when writing Python.
After this came an advert for the Python Ireland conference on Oct 13th-14th and a Python runtime environment of just 11MB called eGenix PyRun. Next was a presentation framework prescons and the website sustainablesouk.com that connects local food producers to food purchasers. The final lightning talk of Saturday was then conference organiser @moreati on “Thought for the Day”. @moreati gives wonderfully funny lightning talks, having used a comedy Russian meerkat accent for his “Compare the Python” lightning talk at PyCon UK 2011. This year he wore a backwards jacket to represent a vicar’s dog collar and proclaimed himself to be the Reverend Moreati from the “Church of Latter Day Snakes”. He then led the audience in singing the “Morning has Broken” hymn, but with alternative Python lyrics.
After the lightning talks came a keynote by @vanL, chairman of the Python Software Foundation, on “Remaking the PSF: The next ten years of Python”. He talked about the role of the Python Software Foundation, future considerations for membership changes and plans for greater linking of national Python conferences and local user groups. Saturday evening was the conference dinner, although I was unable to attend this.
My first talk on the third day (Sunday) of the conference was “Crowd sourcing documentation in SciPy” by Aleksandra Pawlik. She described her studies into the growth and maintenance of the SciPy documentation, including her participation in the SciPy Documentation Project that began in spring 2008. One of the findings of this project was that encouraging more people to contribute documentation took load off core SciPy developers and led to more documentation being produced.
My next talk was “Full Text Search for Trac with Apache Solr” by conference organiser @moreati. He described how he had replaced Trac’s internal search mechanism with a custom plugin and his own Python tool sunburnt. Next up was “Alice’s Adventures in Programming” by @thatdavidmiller. This talk demonstrated wonderful imagination by showing that useful programming advice could be found from passages of “Alice in Wonderland”, including the great piece of advice that “programmers are very good at getting excited about things that are shite”.
The next talk I saw was “CSP and other styles of Pythonic parallelism” by @snim2. She advocated using Communicating Sequential Processes, Actors or DataFlow for concurrency and introduced the python-csp module created by herself and others. @snim2 gave the audience a few code examples on using python-csp, including an example called the “Sleeping Barber Problem” where the participants were named after Monty Python members. Next came the talk “Python-powered Rich Apps” by conference organiser @zeth0. He described how he had used Django, Tornado and MongoDB to create his browser-based magpy application for Humanities scholars.
The final session before lunch was then a PyCon UK panel discussion consisting of 5 members, including @russel_winder and ICT teacher @MissPhilbin. The conference attendees had submitted a wide range of questions to the panel beforehand, where these included Python 2 vs Python 3, Python teaching resources, PEP8 compliance, teaching Python to school kids, Python in the enterprise, and open-source project contributions.
Next up was the second day of lighting talks chaired by Lightning Talk Man. First up came Larry Hastings enthusiastically rapping to a version of “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugarhill Gang, but with modified Python lyrics shown karaoke-style to the audience. Following that came “The Better Mousetrap” about a Django CMS called arkestra. After that came conference organiser @ntoll and a fellow conference organiser with a promotional song for the conference. They had changed the lyrics of “I am the very model of a modern Major-General” from the Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan to special Python lyrics, where these are available at https://github.com/ntoll/programmer_pythonical/blob/master/README.rst. These lyrics were broadcast on screen and the audience all sang along karaoke-style. All conference attendees had been provided with a personalised PyCon UK 2012 mug labelled with “<name> is the very model of a programmer Pythonical”. @ntoll also gave a later lighting talk with a colleague where they arrived on stage carrying tubas and announced to laughter that this was a talk on the Twisted Python framework (of course it was!) They actually then played an impressive rendition of the Monty Python theme tune accompanied by rhythmic clapping from the audience.
The next lightning talk was @technomilk on pretenders, a library that providers fake servers for testing, including a record-replay syntax for mocking interactions with those fake servers. Following him came Larry Hastings again with dryparse, a library he has created for command-line argument parsing in Python. Next up was @lordmauve on “Python Games Programming”, where he used a physics engine in his presentation for impressive live animations. He showed us several examples of Python games, including his previous winning game for the PyWeek competition, Doctor Korovic’s Flying Atomic Squid
Following him came “Securing Subprocess” by Jonathan Satchell and “ROCA: Unobtrusive Web Applications”. @russel_winder then gave a lightning talk called “The GIL must go”, saying that the Global Interpreter Lock in Python is a 1960s uniprocessor solution in a concurrency world. John Allen then gave the final lightning talk on Open Ethics and django-questionnaire.@MissPhilbin also gave a lightning talk on her experiences of teaching ICT to school kids, including her site of teaching resources for her students, “ICT with Miss P”.
Conference organisers @JohnPinner and @zeth0 then bought the third day of the conference to a close with a thank you address. As the fourth day of PyCon UK was for development sprints, the majority of the conference attendees were leaving after the Sunday session. They thanked all attendees and conference organisers, backed by hearty applause from the audience. @JohnPinner and @zeth0 had revealed earlier in a lighting talk that PyConUK 2013 would commence on 20/09/2013, but also that they were planning a PyCon European cruise in spring 2013. This cruise has yet to be confirmed, but would involve a 2-3 day journey to Spain with conference talks given on board the cruise ship.
Overall I really enjoyed this conference. I was pleased to see that the conference had further grown from its success in 2011, both in terms of the number of conference days and the number of attendees. The sessions were varied with lots of knowledgeable Pythonistas present and a friendly atmosphere throughout. There was a good mixture of talks and coding sessions, with the lighting talks adding some wonderful comedy moments into the conference. Even though I’d booked late and was unable to attend the final day of the conference for development sprints, the £190 fee I paid was still great value. Early bird tickets had been available for £100 up until mid-August. The only criticism I have of this conference is that for the second year running, the main room was too hot during packed sessions such as lighting talks. Big congratulations are due to all PyCon UK 2012 organisers for all of their hard work in providing this conference.
This conference showed that the UK Python community is strong and I will definitely be attending PyCon UK 2013. Videos of talks from the main room of the conference are available.
