Wednesday 6 August 2014

PyCon Australia!



I went to PyCon on the weekend! It's a Python - a programming language - conference set here in Brisbane. I volunteered and was placed in the main theatre to do audio/visual work in effort to obtain a free ticket, avoid awkward lonely moments and satisfy my slowly developing altruism.

The view from my station overlooking the main theatre~

The presentations covered many topics from the issues of supporting multiple versions of Python, how to ask questions effectively online, why catering for accessibility will improve your website and what I can only describe as Python bashing. There were loads of technical talks that just went over my head.

Previously, I've used Python a lot for my Project Euler questions mainly because of its support for integer overflow and its handy math libraries. Other than that, I've also just completed an internship in Django (with an awesome Brisbane start-up, Liquid State) , a super handy web app framework, which took up a large portion of the conference.

I find that my peers at uni tend to be repulsed by Python, as it is the first language they're taught and it's associated with bad memories of understanding basic OO.

On Monday I attended Django Girls! Myself and a whole truckload of female developers created our own fully functional Django driven blogs. Here's mine: http://meimakesablawg.herokuapp.com/
It has the basic blog features with ability to log in, edit, create and publish posts. It's no blogger :3

Tutorial: http://tutorial.djangogirls.org/

The tutorial is really easy to follow and I strongly encourage anyone who wants to make their own web app at least to take a look. Django is very high level and is designed to make web development simple so you can get on with whatever you want to do.

The organiser, Elena was absolutely amazing and she gave me the prettiest tech book that I've ever seen. Two Scoops of Django 1.6 signed by the authors, Audrey and Daniel!! It's full of best practices in Django and illustrations featuring humanised ice creams.

 

Quality PyCon stash~ Shirts not pictured as they're in the wash.

The biggest thing I took away from PyCon is an understanding on how the open source community works. In order to keep Python a competitive language, it's necessary to get others involved. Because of this, basically everyone I talk to was super inclusive and willing to help.

^w^

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