Framing

Jessica McKellar's keynote was amazing. It was good in its own right, but was also important in so far as it framed the process of change ongoing in both the python community and its major conference. People know the state of women in FLOSS is abysmal. The effort to turn things around was clear and front and center this year: "outreach works".

Guid Van Rossum's keynote featured a "no to 2.8" image meaning, there is not nor will there be a python-2.8 release. For Fedora and its downstreams, it serves as a reminder that we need to beef up on python3 preparedness. We're making progress. Do pay attention to the proposed change to make python 3 the default in Fedora 22 and help clear the way where you can.

Diversion into ML

I attended a number of talks on machine learning and big data and got all inspired. I wrote this little throwaway program in between sessions. It reads in a bunch of newgroups and then tries to predict which newsgroup each posting belongs to (and after lots of tweaking, it got a 100% success rate which is crazy).

Ultimately, what I want to do is write a plugin for mailman3. In the mailman3/hyperkitty UI you can tag/categorize threads. Each community I imagine would end up tagging threads with their own jargon: "this thread is a flamewar", "this is a feature request", "this one's a bug report", "this is a moonshot".. or whatever. We could build a plugin that reads in all those tags for each community and then builds a predictive model that can be applied to new messages as they come in.

We could proactively tag messages using the community's own jargon! My little script seems to work well enough and we know how to build mailman3 plugins. At this point we just have to wait for the community to accumulate a set of real world tags we could train and test against.

Anyways...

Sprints

Just being there puts us in a position to build relationships with other upstreams and the rest of the community but the PyCon sprints were concretely productive for us this year. A couple people from my team were present.

• Aurélien got his changes merged into mailman proper(!) and they prepared to cut a beta release of the whole suite(!!).
• Toshio put work in on warehouse, the next generation of PyPI.
• Luke tore it up on Bodhi2 (crystal ball -- we'll have it deployed before Flock this year).
• I got a barrel's worth of python3 porting done (fedmsg is now python3 ready!).

Shout out

My good friend Remy Decausemaker got the spot to give the very very last lightning talk at pycon entitled "Adventures in Hackademia" where he talked about the the first open source collegiate minor in the US that some of us have been helping to get started. Very exciting.