PyCon Argentina 2009

13:09 |

This last Friday and Saturday was PyCon Argentina 2009.  It was a roaring success, with over 450 people attending the two-day conference with keynotes by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Collin Winter.

One of the talks I thought was most interesting was Fernando Russ and David Weil’s “Do electric snakes dream?” about dreamPy, a library that should allow you to suspend a piece of Python code in mid execution, serialize it to a blob on disk and later resume from where you left off.  They were showing unpublished work as it still has a couple of creases to iron out, but it should come in very handy for example in restricted execution environments where you have strict execution time limits.

Another very good talk was Ricardo Kirkner’s “Training your favourite reptile: Reinforcement learning in Python” about reply, the pure-python reinforcement learning library.  This is also Lucio Torres’ baby, and I think it’s excellent work, even making it easier to understand all the body of theory behind the api.

Matias Bordese’s talk on the Python bytecode was really good too (or in Collin Winter’s words, “really cool stuff”), taking us on a journey disassembling and modifying small pieces of bytecode by hand and using different tools.
The two keynotes were great, as expected.  Slides for these are available in English (link… soon!).  There was a similar vein in both talks, going over the challenges that lay ahead of us for the next years, Jacob talking from within the web framework (mostly scalability and interoperability, and the easiness trade-off), and Collin from a Python proper point of view (lots of optimizations all over the place).

On Saturday I gave my talk “Hacking MIDI with Python”.  I’m really happy with how it turned out, I think the people that went had fun and I know several are now thinking about starting to play with MIDI and Python too.

Beside the talks, in general the conference was… amazing.  I had four friends staying at my flat during the conference so that gave the whole weekend a nice hackathon flavour.  It was our first PyCon in Argentina, and we weren’t expecting it to be so successful.  With no international publicity (other than the public mailing list archive, banners on blogs and such) we had people coming from Peru, Paraguay and Colombia.  And thanks to a few well placed reminders, unlike the vast majority of the FOSS related conferences in Argentina lately, as far as I know nobody had anything stolen during the conference.
I must say everybody from the organization did an impressive job, I hope PyConAr 2010 (this time in Córdoba) goes just as well.