I was at this year’s Python Conference. This post summarizes what I learned.

Sessions I attended:

• Keynote Wes McKinney (author of pandas)
• CUDA technology in Python Dr Victor Kostuchenko
• create_awesome_api(time_limit=‘1 week’) Nishad Musthafa
• Defining and building your AWS infrastructure George Goh
• Is pypy ready for production? Mark Rees
• Python Memory Management Keshav Agrawal
• Real-time apps with gevent-socketio Calvin Cheng
• Writing, Publishing and Maintaining Reusable Django Apps Martin Brochhaus

Things learned:

• Nishad talked about the tech schema at Plivo. They used Django-tastypie, among others (Flask, gevent) to speed up development of their REST API
• Martin talked about how to write a reusable django app, and share it with the world on the Python Package Index. My favourite talk of the conference. Learned a bunch of little nuances about releasing your python packages as open source. He’s automated the whole process as can be seen here: django-reusable-app-template
• One of the talks were done terribly due to the speaker not having enough mastery over the subject. I learned that it’s important to present something only if you are perfectly comfortable and know the topic inside-out, even if it’s relatively simple.
• The lightning/startup talks were as interesting, if not more, as startups shared how they were using Python in their stack.

• Conferences are not just about the sessions nor the contents of the talks, but the connections and relationships you make with the attendees. A good conference creates an environment to build those connections.
• Made an effort to talk to some of the attendees and startup people. Learned a bunch and got some business cards.

It was a good conference!