Like all conferences this year, PyCon India went virtual and it was my first virtual conference. Hopin platform was used for the talks with Zulip for non-conference chat (syncing, logistics, jobs etc.).

The experience was great. Networking feature randomly pairs you with someone for a 10 min conversation. I met three people and had a good chat.

Talks

I enjoyed some talks.

  1. Continous integration with machine learning by Elle O’Brien was useful to understand how to manage versioning with ML and data with CI/CD. Slides.
  2. I could relate to a talk by Julin on Publishing well-formed Python packages as I’m creating one currently. I wasn’t aware of mypy for static typing.
  3. Vibhu Agarwal presented on developing single sign-on service using Django. For example, signing-in to Google account gives access to Gmail, Drive, Youtube etc. The backend workflows of authentication, access, key allocation were interesting to know. Slides.

Keynotes by Anand (on making apps seem faster), Naomi Ceder (on community in uncertain times) were good. I couldn’t attend the rest.

Chat during the talks, keynotes was refreshing. This wouldn’t be possible to discover during a physical conference unless they Tweet which many don’t. People shared different sorts of interesting links to read. Pity you can’t access the chat post conference.

Birds of a feather session

After a long day of talks, I was looking to unwind and found a BoF session. Kousik Krishnan [LinkedIn] organized one on Python and Performance. The topics were interesting:

  1. which programming language between Java or C++ should a fresher (new graduate) pick to learn since Python isn’t so common in enterprise yet?
  2. reusability and extendability of config files
  3. integrating and debugging elasticsearch in Python applications
  4. should developers update existing applications as they’ll have improved skills after 2 yrs?
  5. how does one debug applications?

Lightning talk

I submitted a workshop proposal that didn’t get through. I pitched the idea for a lightning talk on Day 2 of the conference. In short, it’s a code search engine that works well than GitLab for code discovery.

After not hearing from them I prepared to take a nap. Then I got a call to present it. I fumbled, botched some pronunciations, got the rhythm and completed it. Some were curious about the idea, some complained about the lack of public access. It’s still a WIP product, we’ll extend public access shortly.

You can see the demo, view the material for its internal workings.

Workshop

Along with Jaidev and Annamalai [LinkedIn], I volunteered for a workshop by Anand on animating data in Powerpoint. It was good to see many following along well. There was little work for the volunteers barring a few questions.

A long weekend well spent.