Jaysinh’s own heed

PyDelhi Conf 2017: A beautiful conference happened in New Delhi, India

2017-07-21T12:44:03+00:00

TL;DR

PyDelhi conf 2017 was a two-day conference which featured workshops, dev sprints, both full-length and lightning talks. There were workshop sessions without any extra charges. Delhiites should not miss the chance to attend this conference in future. I conducted a workshop titled “Tango with Django” helping beginners to understand the Django web framework.

Detailed Review

About the PyDelhi community

PyDelhi conf 2017 volunteers

The PyDelhi community was known as NCR Python Users Group before few years. This community is performing a role of an umbrella organization for other FLOSS communities across New Delhi, India. They are actively arranging monthly meetups on interesting topics. Last PyCon India which is a national level conference of Python programming language was impressively organized by this community. This year too they took the responsibility of managing it. I am very thankful to this community for their immense contribution to this society. If you are around New Delhi, India then you should not miss the chance to attend their meetups. This community has great people who are always happy to mentor.

PyDelhi conf 2017

Conference T-shirt

PyDelhi conf is a regional level conference of Python programming language organized by PyDelhi community. It is their second year organizing this conference. Last year it was located at JNU University. This year it happened at IIM, Lucknow campus based in Noida, New Delhi, India. I enjoyed various talks which I will mention later here, a workshops section because I was conducting one and some panel discussions because people involved were having a good level of experience. 80% of the time slot was divided equally between 30 minutes talk and 2-hour workshop section. 10% were given to panel discussions and 10% was reserved for lightning talks. The dev sprints were happening in parallel with the conference. The early slot was given to workshops for both the days. One large conference hall was located on a 2nd floor of the building and two halls at the ground floor. Food and beverages were served on the base floor.

Panel Discussion

Registration desk

Tea break

Keynote speakers

Mr. Ricardo Rocha: Mr. Rocha is a software engineer at CERN. I got some time to talk with him post-conference. We discussed his responsibilities at CERN. I was impressed when he explained how he is managing infrastructure with his team. On inquiring opportunities available at CERN he mentioned that the organization is always looking for the talented developers. New grads can keep an eye on various Summer Internship Programs which are very similar to Google Summer of Code program.

Mr. Chris Stucchio: Mr. Stucchio is director of Data Science at Wingify/ VWO. I found him physically fit compared to other software developers (mostly of India). I didn’t get much time to have a word with him.

Interesting Talks

Because I took the wrong metro train, I was late for the inaugural ceremony. I also missed a keynote given by Mr. Rocha. Below talks were impressively presented at the conference.

Let’s talk about GIL by Mr. Amit Kumar: Mr. Kumar discussed various ways to trace threads first and then moved the track towards Global Interpreter Lock. He described why the GIL is important in CPython.
Concurrency in Python 3.0 world - Oh my! by Mr. Anand Pillai: Mr. Pillai is well experienced in programming using Python language. I like getting his advices on various programming topics. He explained how async IO can be leveraged to boost your programs. I got few correct references on understanding latest API of the async library.
Property based testing 101 by Aniket Maithani: I always enjoy chit chatting with Mr. Maithani during conferences. He has jolly nature and always prepared with one liner. He discussed various strategies for generating demo data for test cases. I was amazed by his references, tips and tricks for generating test data.

I love discussing with people rather than sit in on sessions. With that ace-reason, I always lose some important talks presented at the conference. I do not forget to watch them once they are publicly available. This year I missed following talks.

Volunteer Party

I got a warm invitation by the organizers to join the volunteer party, but I was little tensed about my session happening on the next day. So, I decided to go home and improve the slides. I heard from friends that the party was awesome!

My workshop session

Me conducting workshop

I conducted a workshop on Django web framework. “Tango with Django” was chosen as a title with a thought of attracting beginners. I believe this title is already a name of famous book solving the same purpose.

Dev sprints

Me hacking at dev sprints section

The dev sprints were happening parallel with the conference. Mr. Pillai was representing Junction. I decided to test few issues of CPython but didn’t do much. There were a bunch of people hacking but didn’t find anything interesting. The quality of chairs was so an impressive that I have decided to buy the same for my home office.

Why attend this conference?

Free Workshops: The conference has great slot of talks and workshops. Workshops are being conducted by field experts without expecting any other fees. This can be one of the great advantages you leverage from this conference.
Student discounts: If you are a student then you will receive a discount on the conference ticket.
Beginner friendly platform: If you are novice speaker than you will get mentorship from this community. You can conduct a session for beginners.
Networking: You will find senior employees of tech giants, owner of innovative start-ups and professors from well-known universities participating in this conference. It can be a good opportunity for you to network with them.

What was missing?

Lecture hall arrangement: It was difficult to frequently travel to the second floor and come back to the ground floor. I found most people were spending their time on the ground floor rather than attending talks going on upstairs.
No corporate stalls: Despite having corporate sponsors like Microsoft I didn’t find any stall of any company.
The venue for dev sprints: The rooms were designed for teleconference containing circularly arranged wooden tables. This was not creating a collaborative environment. Involved projects were not frequently promoted during the conference.

Thank you PyDelhi community!

I would like to thank all the known, unknown volunteers who performed their best in arranging this conference. I am encouraging PyDelhi community for keep organizing such an affable conference.

Proofreaders: Mr. Daniel Foerster, Mr. Dhavan Vaidya, Mr. Sayan Chowdhury, Mr. Trent Buck

Pycon Pune 2017: A wonderful Python conference

2017-03-14T12:48:02+00:00

tl;dr

The conference is worth attending if you are a student, programmer or a hobbyist. If you are a swag-hungry then don’t expect much as a swag from this conference. If you are a Devsprint lover, then this conference has the coolest Devsprint. A great number of keynote speakers are invited for this conference.

Detailed Experience

Because I was volunteering for this conference I reached Pune one day earlier than the conference days. The volunteer meeting was happening at Reserved-bit.

Volunteer

Reserved-bit

Reserved-bit is the best hackerspace I have ever come across. It has a large collection of programmable boards. You will find boards like Raspberry Pi, Bana Pi, Dragonboard, Bigalbon, BBC-microbit and the 3D printer. Furthermore, this space has a great collection of books on Compilers and Embedded programming. I managed to found few on open-source too. The owners are great hackers. You will love to interact with hacker Siddhesh Poyarekar. Hacker Nisha Poyarekar is volunteering the PyLadies community at Pune.

Pune to Mumbai

I spent my half day in this space. I got the responsibility of receiving one of the keynote speakers who was landing at Mumbai airport midnight. To be frank, estimation of Google Maps between Pune to Mumbai is wrong. It showed nearly 2 hours but it took almost 4.5 hours to reach Mumbai. It took few more minutes to reach the airport. The road is impressively smooth. You will encounter the beautiful mountains of Lonavla. The task of moving from Pune to Mumbai airport, receive Katie and come back to Pune was completed in almost 13 hours. I left from Pune around 4.30 PM and came back at nearly 5 AM next day early morning.

Illness during conference

Because I did a huge amount of traveling at that night, I was unable to get enough sleep. Such tiredness resulted in an eye infection. I managed to attend the first day of the conference, but I was not in a condition to attend the second day. Treatment from local doctor healed me in two days and then I was able to take part into Devsprint.

Conference

The conference was a total of 4 days where the initial two days were for the talks and the end was assigned for a Devsprint. It didn’t overwhelmed me with many tracks but gave the quality talks presented in a single track. The talks were set from 9 AM to 5 PM which was taken little lightly by the attendees.

I was pretty impressed with the keynote speakers of this conference.

Katie Cunningham

Katie is the O’Reilly author. Her book on Accessibility depicts her area of expertise. She is fun to talk to. She likes to listen about developer communities, writing and most importantly computer games. Her broad vision on product development is amazing. She is an avid reader. I enjoyed listening to her experience of being in India for the very first time.

Honza Kral

Honza is the dude who loves contributing to Django. He is a core contributor of Django too. He hacks on Python drivers at Elastic. I was impressed with his suggestions on a code design problem I was trying to solve from the past few months. His suggestions on code design are worth noticing. He is a vimmer and maintains little vim plugins as a part of his interest.

Stephen J. Turnbull

Stephen professes the Dismal Science of Economics. His knowledge is deep-rooted just like his beard. You will enjoy discussing computer science, books and his experience of programming. He is authoring few books written in the Japanese language. Stephen is Emacsite.

Terri Oda

Terri is a security nerd. She spent most of her time exploring tools at Intel. Terri knows how to hide from the spying of the U.S. Government. She is leading Google Summer of Code section from Python Software Foundation. Terri is PSF community service award winner. If you are a student and want to take part in GSoC choosing PSF as your organization then she is the right person to talk to.

Florian Fuchs

His knowledge on ReST API construction is the best. He is a Falcon nerd too. I enjoyed discussing various authentication mechanisms for ReST API with him. He is a Red Hatter.

Nick Coghlan

Nick listens more than he speaks. I will advise you to not disturb him if he is coding. He enjoys concentrating while coding. Getting his mentorship was a great experience. He has been contributing to Core Python for a decade now. You will enjoy discussing on interesting code compositions with him. He is a Red Hatter.

Praveen Patil

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to talk with Praveen during this conference. He is a math teacher who teaches concepts of mathematics using Python programming language. You should feel confident to speak with him on Python in education and mathematics with him.

John Hawley

John is the wittiest person that I know. His lines always end with humor. He hacks mostly on hardware and GNU/Linux. Micro Python and GNU/Linux should be considered as part of his interests.

I am sad to declare that I was unable to attend any keynote speeches because of the illness. Mostly I rested at the hotel or talked with people during the conference days.

Volunteer Party

If you are volunteering for this conference, then you will be invited to a volunteer dinner party. We enjoyed party colored disco lights dancing on the bits of the DJ. Punjabi food was served, and if you were above 25 than you were allowed to take a sip of a beer.

Devsprint

Devsprint happen at the Red Hat Headquarters, Pune. I found the building has tight security. You will find an individual pantry section dedicated to each department. We were instructed to hack at a huge cafeteria section. I myself contributed to Core Python. Nick Coghlan was mentoring for Core Python. I reviewed one PR, found one broken test case and wrote a fix of an existing issue with his help. Honza was leading the development of Django web framework. A team of Anand Chitipothu mentored for Web2py. Farhaan Bukhsh mentored for Pagure. John Hawley encouraged contributing to MicroPython. Terr Oda, Stephen Turnbull and Florian Fuchs mentored for GNU/Mailman.

Why attend this conference?

This conference has the coolest Devsprint. The organizers understand the value of the Devsprint in a conference. I have never observed such an importance of Devsprint at any other Python conference happening in India.
If you are a student, then this is a beginner friendly conference. Don’t be afraid to attend if you are a Python noob. You will receive a student concession for the tickets too.
If you are a developer, coming to this conference will inspire you to grow from your present level. You will meet core contributors, lead programmers, owners of startups and project managers. You will find a huge scope of opportunities to network with people.
The conference is single track event. This decision helped me to not miss the interesting talks. In my previous experience, parallel tracks forced me to choose between talks when I was interested in both, which killed me.
I have never seen such a huge amount of keynote speakers at any conference happening in India. Keynote speakers were the main attraction of this conference.

What was missing?

If you are a swag-hungry fellow than attending this conference won’t be worth it. The conference attendees have to be satisfied with the conference T-shirt.
I observed there were fewer corporate stalls than at other Python conferences. A stole from Reserved-bit, Red Hat and PSF community stall was there.
A workshop section was completely missing. In my opinion, the workshop helps the beginners to start. There were a few topics which can be better represented as workshop rather than a talk.
I was unable to observe any dedicated section for an open space discussion. This section is helpful for communities and contributors to discuss interesting problems and think together.

Jaysinh’s own heed

PyDelhi Conf 2017: A beautiful conference happened in New Delhi, India

TL;DR

Detailed Review

About the PyDelhi community

Keynote speakers

Interesting Talks

Volunteer Party

My workshop session

Dev sprints

Why attend this conference?

What was missing?

Thank you PyDelhi community!

Proofreaders: Mr. Daniel Foerster, Mr. Dhavan Vaidya, Mr. Sayan Chowdhury, Mr. Trent Buck

Pycon Pune 2017: A wonderful Python conference

tl;dr

Detailed Experience

Volunteer

Reserved-bit

Pune to Mumbai

Illness during conference

Conference

Volunteer Party

Devsprint

Why attend this conference?

What was missing?

Proofreader: Benaiah Mischenko, Chameleon