A strong line-up of speakers and the post-PyCon AU buzz meant that we had about 35 people at the August Melbourne Python Users Group meeting. There were five presentations for the night and here are my random notes.
1. Highlights from PyCon AU 2014
Various people contributed their highlights of PyCon AU 2014, which was in Brisbane in early August (and the reason why the MPUG meeting was moved back a week). The conference videos are now up on the Youtube channel.
2. Javier Candeira: “Don’t monkeypatch None!”
Javier was inspired by discussion at PyCon AU about PEP 336 (Make None Callable) and decided to implement it, with some inspiration from previous PyCon AU talks by Ryan Kelly, Richard Jones (“Don’t do this!”), Nick Coghlan (“Elegant and ugly hacks in CPython”) and Larry Hastings.
He has implemented quiet_None, an analog to quiet_NaN. He walked us through the prototype code, with a deviation into Haskell’s Maybe monad along the way.
A few random notes:
- Uses the
ContextDecoratorclass - Module: “forbiddenfruit” and “curse” function
- Won’t work on stackless or IronPython (as they have no working implementation of
sys._getframe() - Problems with exceptions, so the code needs to monkeypatch
Exception!
3. Juan Nunez-Iglesias: SciPy 2014, a summary
Juan works at VLSCI and is a scikit-image contributor
- Great quote: Greg Wilson (keynote) on Software Carpentry: “we save researchers a day a week for the rest of their careers”
- Lots of core devs from biggest names in Python scientific stack
- Excellent tutorials; massive geoscience track, massive education track
- EuroSciPy seems to be more academic
- PyCon AU – very web development focus
SciPy 2014 highlights:
- Michael Droettboom – Airspeed Velocity: code benchmarking tool with web interface and plots
- Paul Ivanov – IPython vimception: vim bindings for IPython notebook
- Damian Avila – RISE: live presentations from IPython notebooks
- MinRK (from core IPython team) – IPython Parallel tutorial
- Brian Granger & ????
- Aaron Meurer: Conda – good package manager for C extensions as well as Python packages
- Matt Rocklin, Mark Wiebe: Blaze – abstracting away tabular data
Recommended lightning talks:
- Project Jupyter
- Waffles
On Juan’s “to watch” list:
- Chris Fonnesbeck PyMC tutorial (see Jake Vanderplas’s Bayesian vs frequentist posts)
- David Sanders: Julia tutorial
- Reproducible science tutorial (lots of buzz on this tutorial)
- Geoscience and education tracks
- Diversity: 1.5% women in 2013, 15% in 2014 – indicative of a big problem in the industry
4. Rory Hart: Microservices in Python
This was a repeat of Rory’s PyCon AU 2014 talk (here’s the video).
5. Nick Farrell: sux
Nick gave a repeat of his PyCon AU 2014 lightning talk on the sux library, which allows you to transparently use Python 2 packages in Python 3.