Graham King

Solvitas perambulum

PyCon 2013: My two favorite talks

Summary
PyCon is an annual event for Python programmers, featuring recorded talks available online. My top pick was "EduPsych Theory for Python Hackers," which, despite the speaker's challenging delivery, provided valuable insights about learning, resulting in 18 pages of notes. I also enjoyed "Crypto 101," which clearly explained cryptography concepts from basic block ciphers to message authentication. Other noteworthy talks included Guido's keynote on Python 3.4's co-routines, "Making DISQUS Realtime," a demonstration on secure authentication with Mozilla Persona, and advice on porting Django apps to Python 3. If I missed any great talks, feel free to share!

PyCon is an annual gathering of Python programmers. All the talks are recorded and distributed freely on the web. My two favorite talks were:

  • EduPsych Theory for Python Hackers: A Whirlwind Overview: How learning works, in 30 minutes. The speaker can be difficult to understand, but stick with it. I learnt so much, and took about 18 pages of notes. Here’s her blog post about the talk. To me, this was the best talk of PyCon 2013.

  • Crypto 101: After this you’ll finally understand Crypto. He builds from a basic block cipher, to a stream cipher, then covers hashes (and why they aren’t secure), key exchange, message authentication codes, etc. Really interesting and easy to follow.

A few other interesting or noteworthy talks I attended:

  • Guido’s keynote. Python 3.4 will have non-blocking co-routines, very similar to Go’s go-routines, and inspired by C#’s async / await operators. The syntax is a little awkward for three reasons: because it’s being added later (versus Go it’s there from the start), because Guido doesn’t want to add any more keywords (so it’s yield from my_coroutine()), and because it’s partly based on Twisted. Still cool though.

  • Making DISQUS Realtime: Interesting to see the path DISQUS took to get real-time comments in their widget. The key component is nginx’s nginx_push_stream.

  • Beyond Passwords: Secure Authentication with Mozilla Persona: Nice demo of Persona / BrowserID by a Mozilla evangelist.

  • Porting Django apps to Python 3 by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Nicely summarizes the state of Django on Python 3, and gives advice on upgrading apps to work on both 2 and 3.

Here are all the PyCon 2013 talks. Are there any great talks that I missed? Please let me know in the comments.