PyCon AU 2012 was held this last weekend (Aug 18 – 19) in beautiful Hobart. Here are some of my highlights…
There were two great keynotes by Mark Ramm and Kenneth Reitz.
Mark Ramm’s keynote
The biggest problem of PyCon AU? Too many good talks on at the same time! Apologies to the various friends whose talks I didn’t get to. Maybe next year? That combined with running three hours of tutorials across the two days meant I didn’t end up seeing as many talks as I wanted, but I did get to the following talks:
- Python Dark Corners Revisited by Peter Lovett
- Building a Cloud Service with Python by John Barham
- Python Lifesavers by Duncan Macneil
- PyPy – is it ready for production? by Mark Rees
- First time speakers lightning talks by Brianna Laugher
- Working with large scientific data at the Australian Synchrotron and beyond by Steve Androulakis
- Detecting and visualising large scale colour trends by Dennis Hotson and Lars Yencken
- Big data with python by Alex Sharp
- A noob looks at Message Queueing by Richard Jones
Quote of the conference?
>>> True = False >>> True == False True
Peter Lovett visiting Python’s dark corners
As always, I walked away with a long list of new tools, libraries and web sites to check out: MyTardis, Python Guide, Sikuli, R-Tree and a bunch of web tools: fabric, diazo, gunicorn, nginx, daemontools, celery, memcached, stathat.
There was a fantastic collection of inspiring, interesting and amusing lightning talks at the end of each, including talks on dancing robots, automating logins to banking web sites, Sikuli (again) and Python 3.3 highlights.
Another highlight was the cruise down the Derwent River to Peppermint Bay to the (yummy) conference dinner.
Derwent River cruise
Conference dinner menu
There were lots of other highlights: the conference was very well run, good food, lots of interesting chats in the corridors and between talks, and the early morning runs with conference people.
The view from the conference at dusk
And finally: excellent “African Swallow” coffee from Ritual Coffee in Launceston — thanks for the top-notch strong flat whites and the business card: I never realised that “Bean Shepherd” was a profession!
It’s now on to two days of sprints.