An Account of PyCon India 2009
The first Python Conference in India was held on the 25th and 26th of September 2009, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. This is my attempt at recounting my experiences at the conference.
My own slides for my talks will be put up somewhere soon, I’m sorry I haven’t done it already.
With uncharacteristic resolve, I had submitted proposals for 2 talks to the conference, one a lightning talk, and the other a full length talk. I had done this almost as soon as the call for proposals had opened, which was also uncharacteristically foresighted of me. In any case, as the event drew nearer, it became obvious that although there would be quite a few talks, there wasn’t really any competition, and everyone who’d said they’d talk, would. So I guess I lucked out.
The preparation for my talks was less than focused, I keep getting sidetracked on the smallest of issues, like what presentation software to use, and what background color to put. It didn’t help that I had chosen to do a Lessig-style talk either.
A Lessig-style talk, named after Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig refers to a type of talk where the presenter gives a fast-paced talk, with the slides changing rapidly. Each slide generally has no more than a single word or image, sometimes just a single letter. The kicker is that if a presenter wants to give this type of talk for any respectable duration of time, then they’re going to be preparing a lot of slides.
So I got through the slide preparation, having made several compromises on style vs. practicality along the way. Sometime in between I even managed to get train tickets, along with Harsh (aka QwertyManiac). The end result was that I got to Bangalore with relative ease. Train ride was uneventful, but plush, Indian railways definitely need more Shatabdi.
We got there on Friday the 25th, which gave us a day to scout out the surroundings. We definitely needed it, it took us a very long time to get to the hotel across the bridge from the railway station. In any case, we eventually found the place where we’d be holing up for the weekend, dumped everything, and went looking for lunch.
Next stop was the venue, the Indian Institute of Science. Thankfully it wasn’t too far from where we were, about 4km. This however was sufficient to make getting there difficult; any statement about Bangalore having bad traffic is an understatement. Once we got in however, it was like entering a bubble. It’s peaceful inside, hardly any traffic, and there’s all that landscaped scenery.
We looked around, snapped some photos, and found the guys organizing the conference at a cafeteria ordering too much tea. Hung around a bit, and left, it was getting late.
Day 1
Woke up to sounds of Ramkumar (aka Artagon) calling to tell me that he had finally made it to Bangalore. After giving him the address of our lodge, he got there with much greater facility than we had.
We set out to IISc after breakfast, got there before time to stand face to face with an enormous waiting line of people who had registered early on the net so they could avoid the inconvenience of standing in a line. As had I. That could have been done a bit better. Got through the line, flashed the ID card that I had printed beforehand (which was completely useless), and got my swag bag. The swag bag had a few goodies, including a nice PyCon T-Shirt, the quote on the back of which I really don’t get.
There were three conference tracks, two in halls opposite each other, and the other on the other side of the compound. Mine of course, was on the other side of the compound, at around 14:45.
Morning Session
The first talk of the day was the keynote address, by Prabhu Ramachandran. He’s the creator of Mayavi, a 3D visualization tool in Python. The talk was nice, but not satisfying for me, personally. I felt that as a Python Conference, the keynote should have had more to do with Python as a language. In fact, that’s a theme you’re going to be hearing from me a lot in this entry, the lack of core language aspects and the abundance of application.
I drifted around after that, looking at the various halls and seeing what they had to offer. There was nothing else I was interested at the time, so I trudged back to the main hall in anticipation of the first lightning talk session.
I’m still wondering if there any further lightning talks that session. There was something going on, but it’s connection to Python was sketchy at best, and neither did they understand the meaning of the word lightning. My lightning talk was postponed to the next day.
Afternoon Session
After lunch, I attended a talk on Test Driven Development, given by Siddharta. This talk was amazing, even though I knew and followed Test Driven Development, I was impressed. A great talk.
The next session, was mine. My first talk was the full length one, on “Idiomatic Python”. The title, of course, is the same as the talk given by David Goodger at PyCon 2007. The focus of the talk was also roughly the same, albeit being slightly updated with respect to Python 3.x. I was, of course, practicing what I preached, namely that there should have been more core language talks.
The talk went well, and I reached the previously unthinkable time limit of 45 minutes with ease, and then went over with questions. Thankfully, the questions were ones I could answer, I got so many I had to take it out of the hall. I like it when things go right like that.
I considered sitting in on the Django talk which followed immediately, but it was at a level that was simply too low for me, I left at that point.
In sum, the talks on the first day were good, but the conversation was better, that’s why I turned up.
Day 2
The second day of the conference featured a much lower turnout, but that was to be expected. The day was initially scheduled to be a half-day, with the second half devoted to BoFs and informal gatherings, but the spill-overs from the previous day extended the schedule a bit.
The first talk of the day was on Python and .NET, given by Keerthi Shankar. Although I’m generally biased against .NET and Windows programming, I found the talk quite interesting. Being able to interoperate Python with other .NET languages through the .NET CLR is definitely cleaner on the surface than struggling with the Python C API, or using Cython, etc.
The next talk was the meta-talk, titled “The road to PyCon India”, given by Noufal. It was good as meta talks go, but not more.
I actually stayed a full 10 minutes in the next talk on Natural Language Processing in Python. Those 10 minutes are accounted for by the topic, which is an interesting one. The presenter read his presentation from gedit, and what he lacked in pictures, he made up with text. And did I mention that he read from the screen?
The final session of the day was the second session of lightning talks. Although I was slated to go second, I was pushed into the after lunch by some sponsored talk. I’m not grudging it, but it would’ve been nice to know beforehand.
The first lightning talk was on building a game with Pyglets, a cross platform windowing and multimedia library for Python. The talk was given by Arun, and he did a good job, the idea was good and I loved the finished demo at the end.
He did however violate the primal rule of lightning talks - Lightning talks are supposed to be short!. Like lightning, actually. The talk organizers should have booted him off after the first 5 minutes + the next 5 extensions minutes. Not that the talk wasn’t good, but it was just too long. He could have taken it as a full-length talk and I’d have sat through the entire thing.
After lunch came my lightning talk, “Seeking help with Python”. It was a talk born out of frustration in answering question after question repeatedly with the words “Just Google It!”. The concept was simple, I kept it short (again, I practice what I preach), and it went well. I may have been preaching to the converted though (it was a Python conference after all).
Abhishek then gave his talk on his experiments with two of his web services. The first was one which took a domain name and checked which of its TLDs were available. The second was a service that built on the first, and continuously generated Web 2.0-ish domain names that are available.
The programming was good, but I found the whole concept of generating names in that manner just a bit off-putting. If you want to take a look you can, it’s called web2hunter, and it’s hosted on Google AppEngine.
The last thing I can remember about the day was Ramkumar giving his lightning talk on the GIL. Now this is the kind of topic I would have liked to have seen more at the conference, something dealing with the core of the Python language.
I regret not giving Ramkumar the idea of speaking on this topic when he could have submitted a proposal, and I think he feels the same way. The talk went very well, I actually understood something. If I get the chance I’m going to read up on the theory and give the talk myself sometime, it’s a really interesting subject.
Final Thoughts
All said and done, I’m very happy I went to PyCon. I’m even happier that I presented something there, and would definitely do it again if I get the opportunity. I had a great time and learnt a lot, so much that I made a list of things I had to try out when I got back. Now I spend the coming months trying to knock items off that list.
Haven’t you put up slides anywhere yet?
I have now :). http://lucentbeing.com/blog/slides-for-my-pycon-india-2009-talks/