Code Kills

Like always, the best parts of PyCon 2011 happened outside of scheduled talks (one particular highlight was a long conversation with Tavis Rudd, author of the Cheeta template engine, about why HTML templates are bad)… But since those parts weren't recorded, I can't very well recommend watching them. The talks were recorded, though, and here are the ones I'd recommend watching.

(NB: this is not a complete list of good talks, just the ones I found/will find interesting. Check the PyCon 2011 schedule for a complete list of talks, then search Google for {talk title} site:blip.tv to find the videos.)

Talks I Attended

Ordered roughly by how much I enjoyed them.

• Using Python 3 to Build a Cloud Computing Service for my Superboard II by David Beazley (video link) — very amusing
• How to write obfuscated python by Rev. Johnny Healey (video link) — also very amusing
• Everything You Wanted To Know About Pickling, But Were Afraid To Ask! by Richard T. Saunders (video link) — enjoyable, informative
• "Dude, Where's My RAM?" - A deep dive into how Python uses memory by Dave Malcolm (video link) — it would be hard to get much lower-level than this talk
• Reverse-engineering Ian Bicking's brain: inside pip and virtualenv by Carl Meyer (video link) — Carl builds a virtualenv from scratch to show how virtualenv works
• API Design: Lessons Learned by Raymond Hettinger (video link) — Raymond Hettinger wrote many of Python's core data structures, and he presents some good advice on API design with examples to back it up
• Genetic Programming in Python by Eric Floehr (video link) — enjoyable, good examples, interesting stuff
• The Python That Wasn't by Larry Hastings (video link) — rejected PEPs and features which didn't make it into Python (also, I enjoy Larry's talks)
• Testing with mock by Michael Foord (video link) — the title says it all (Michael Foord is the author of Mock)
• Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ by Zed Shaw (video link) — ZeroMQ looks really neat, talk is a nice overview
• Fun with Python's Newer Tools by Raymond Hettinger (video link) — another talk by Hettinger, shows some interesting tidbits
• Best Practices for Impossible Deadlines by Christopher Groskopf (video link) — makes me glad I don't work for a newspaper

Talks I want to watch

In alphabetical order.

• Get new contributors (and diversity) through outreach by Asheesh Laroia (video link) — Asheesh is an awesome guy, I'm looking forward to hearing this talk
• Handling ridiculous amounts of data with probabilistic data structures by C. Titus Brown (video link) — Titus is a good presenter, and I heard a lot of good things about this talk
• How to kill a patent with Python by Van Lindberg (video link) — Van is also a good presenter, heard good things about this talk
• Linguistics of Twitter by Michael D. Healy (video link) — looks interesting
• Python and Robots: Teaching Programming in High School by Vern Ceder (video link) — heard lots of good things about this talk
• Python-Aware Python by Ned Batchelder (video link) — looks interesting
• Status of Unicode in Python 3 by Victor Stinner (video link) — looks interesting (but, then, I'm abnormally interested in Unicode)
• Swarming the Web: Evolving the Perfect Config File by Kurt Grandis (video link) — looks interesting
• Through the Side Channel: Timing and Implementation Attacks in Python by Geremy Condra (video link) — looks interesting
• Useful Namespaces: Context Managers and Decorators by Jack Diederich (video link) — looks interesting
• Using Blender's new BPY Python API by Christopher Allan Webber (video link) — heard good things about it, I'd like to learn Blender's API
• Using Python to debug C and C++ code (using gdb) by Dave Malcolm (video link) — looks interesting
• Why is Python slow and how PyPy can help? by Maciej Fijałkowski and Alex Gaynor (video link) — PyPy is freaking awesome, I want to learn more about it

Problem: you need to enumerate the binary strings between 000 and 111 (ie, 000, 001, 010, …).

Solution: itertools.product:

>>> from itertools import product
>>> for bits in product([0, 1], repeat=3):
...     print "".join(str(bit) for bit in bits)
...
000
001
010
011
…
>>>

For more like this, check out Raymond Hettinger's (really good) talk Fun with Python's Newer Tools, from PyCon 2011.

It appears that, at some point, I stopped getting notifications of new comments… I've sorted that out now, though, and please forgive me for my tardiness in replying to old comments.