[three]Bean

A few of us from Fedora are at PyCon US in Montreal for the week. The conference portion is almost over and the sprints start tomorrow, but in the meantime here are some highlights from the best sessions I sat in on:

• @nnja gave a great talk on technical debt and how it can contribute to a "culture of despair".
• @sigmavirus24's talk on writing tests against python-requests was supremely useful. Using his material, I wrote a patch for anitya that solved an onerous and recurring issue with the test suite.
• You've just got to see this talk on pypy.js. In short, he used llvm to compile pypy into javascript so it can run in the browser (with asm.js) which runs faster than CPython, amazingly.
• Raymond Hettlinger gave a very nice talk on "moving beyond pep8" which was pretty relevant for my team and our code review practices. We write a lot of code which entails doing a lot of code review. His thesis: working in a cosmetic pep8 mindset causes you to often miss the elephant in the room when doing code review. Instructive.
• There was a very good talk on one particular company's experiences with a microservices architecture. It is of special interest to me and our work on the Fedora Infrastructure team with lots of good take-aways. The video of it hasn't been posted yet, but definitely search for it in the coming days.
• I quite disagreed with some of the method presented in the effective python session. No need for wrapper-class boilerplate -- just use itertools.tee(...)!
• Some others: distributed systems theory, interpreting your genome, systems stuff for non-systems people, and ansible were all very nice.

Some hacking happened in the interstitial periods!

• I wrote a prototype of a system to calculate and store statistics about fedmsg activity and some plugins for it. This will hopefully turn out to be quite useful for building community dashboards in the future (like a revamped releng dashboard or the nascent fedora-hubs).
• We ported python-fedora to python3! Hooray!
• The GSOC deadline really snuck up on us, so Pierre-Yves Chibon and I carved out some time to sit down and go over all the pending applications.

I'm really looking forwards to the sprints and the chance to work and connect with all our upstreams. We'll be holding a "Live From Pycon" video cast at some point. Details forthcoming. Happy Hacking!