PyCon 2013: My two favorite talks
Summary
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.
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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’syield 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.