Day 1 at PyCon
Tue Oct 17 23:29:57 IST 2023 by nsd
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend PyCon India in Hyderabad. This blog post will provide an overview of my journey, the conference itself, and a few snapshots I captured along the way.
PyCon took place on September 30th and October 1st. However, a hurdle emerged when I was due to fly out on September 29th. A Karnataka-wide bandh had been declared, meaning all taxi services to the airport were unavailable. I had planned to utilise the Atlassian Uber service, but the bandh eliminated that option. I considered various alternatives, including hiring an ambulance to ensure a safe arrival at the airport.
Faseem contacting the local bus service and confirming that KIA buses would operate despite the bandh. This information brought much-needed relief.
Earlier in the year, I had the chance to attend DebConf, but a scheduling clash with my team’s offsite forced me to cancel. I was thus even more determined not to miss PyCon. Thanks to the KIA buses, I managed to reach the airport without any hiccups.
The Karnataka airport was a sight to behold, with its unique design.
I boarded a Vistara Airways flight to Hyderabad. The journey was brief, clocking in at around 45 minutes. To my surprise, they served a small snack pack onboard, an unexpected perk for a short domestic flight.
The conference was conducted in JNTU university Hyderabad. Quite a nice college. But cant beat NIT Calicut for sure. The organisers arranged free e-auto rides inside campus. This was quite a nice thing considering the venues for different talks were scattered throughout the campus.
The conference food was delightful on both days.
I received a t-shirt and a jute bag as souvenirs.
The first keynote speaker, Jessica Greene, emphasised the importance of maintaining a hacker culture. She suggested setting aside a day every week or two to collaborate with like-minded friends. This advice resonated with me, as it echoed a similar suggestion made by my college professor, Dr. Murali.
Anand’s presentation on Minecraft Coding was quite interesting. He connected a Minecraft instance to his Python code, enabling him to procedurally generate anything buildable within Minecraft. Considering Minecraft has Turing Complete components, this would be a super power for creative coding. His use of ChatGPT to construct much of the boilerplate code was interesting, though he pointed out its limitations when dealing with complex tasks.
Sangarshanan’s presentation on creating music with Python was the most “fun” talk. His team at FoxDot is developing an open-source framework to program music. He even live-coded a short music piece, which was quite entertaining. The following youtube clip is taken from their website.
Unrelated but an old YouTube video that I had watched on “the art of coding”. I have rewatched this multiple times. 1hr long but worth the watch.
Marcelo, one of the maintainers of FastAPI, also held a keynote. However, as I’ve not worked with FastAPIs, most of his talk was a bit beyond my understanding.
Several talks highlighted the existing pay gap in the tech industry. I was surprised by this as I believed the tech industry was immune to such disparities. Clearly, I need to educate myself more on this topic.
Overall the conference had quite a few interesting discussions. If you have worked with python. Or is just curious about coding / computer science you will enjoy PyCon.