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PyCon Report, 2016

Jun 06, 2016 | categories: python, fedora, pycon View Comments

Like in previous years, a few of us from Fedora were at PyCon US in Portland Oregon for the week. The conference is over now (I'm sticking around for a day to explore the Pacific Northwest). Here are some of the highlights from the talks attended and the community sprint days:

Talks worth checking out

K Lars Lohn's final keynote was out of control. None of us were ready for it. It wasn't even about python but I know everyone loved it. Parisa Tabriz's keynote on hacker mindset was very good (she's the "security princess" at Google) and Guido van Rossum's keynote on the state of python wandered off into an interesting autobiography about what made Python possible. If you're interested in software architecture, the Wednesday morning keynote on Plone and Zope by @cewing was an interesting overview of the evolution of that stack.
Alex Gaynor's talk on automation for dev groups, cleverly titled "The cobbler's children have no shoes" was close to my heart. There was a salient point in the Q&A section about how while we often focus on automating workflows that are somehow problematic, sometimes that problem is a deeper social one. Automation can surface and inadvertantly exacerbate a tension between groups that have friction.
For web development stuff, three talks are worth highlighting: @callahad of Mozilla (who is an awesome person) gave a talk on new mobile web technologies, Service Workers, Push, and App Manifests. It's worth a listen for people in the Fedora and Red Hat infrastructure ecosystem. @dshafik of Akamai gave a super interesting talk on HTTP/2 and the consequences for web devs. The short of it is that we have all these hacks in place that have become "best practice" over the years (sprite sheets, compressed and concatenated assets, bloated collection REST responses), none of which are necessary or desirable when we have HTTP/2 ready to go server-side. Sixty percent of browsers are ready to consume HTTP/2 apps and its all backwards compatible. Definitely worth looking into. Last but not least, if you do wev development, check out Sumana's talk titled "HTTP can do that?!" which goes over how to get the most out of HTTP/1 (something we've not always been the best at doing) -- very engaging.
If you watch any of the talks here, check out Larry Hasting's talk on removing python's global interpreter lock. It's important if you use the language, deal with performance issues, and especially if you write C extensions. If none of those are you -- the details of the interpreter implementation are still super interesting. #gilectomy
Of course the hallway track was the most valuable. I had good talks with @goodwillbits, @lvh, @sils1297, and too many others to mention.

For the community code sprints, I hacked with a couple other people on the test suite for koji which is the build system used by Fedora and many other RPM-based Linux distributions. We have a lot of web services and systems that go into producing the distro. Koji was one of the first that was written back in the day and it is starting to show its age. Getting test coverage up to a reasonable state is a pre-requisite for further refactoring (porting to python3, making it more modular, faster, etc..).

Huge shoutout to Sijis Aviles, Joel Vasallo, and Robert Belozi for slogging through it with me. We had fun!

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