After 3 years, I attended another PyCon. Carnival was in Portland this time, a city of original hipsters and weirdos. (No offense, locals call themselves so.)
I also visited Django Girls PyCon Installation Party, an event by Django Girls Portland. I met with the DG Portland team; Kenneth Love and Terian Koscik. I loved the Twitter bot of Terian. (See @how2butt for fun.)
I shot some photos at Installation Party. (link to Flickr album)
Hi,
This is a after-Pycon post. I have been there and that was awesome.
There were more than 2500 attendees, which makes everywhere full of developers, hackers, great ideas, startups. Moreover, almost everything is related with Python in one way or other.
First, The Venue
Pycon was in Santa Clara Convention Center, Mountain View. Convention Center is big, actually, it is huge. There were enough room and places for every talk, attendee and event. Usually some rooms are full in conferences and you stand, or you can’t listen to talk. Every room was big enough for everyone. That was great.
Second, The Conference
This section may be a little long, since conference was full of great details. There are lots of sessions, almost every of them has an interesting topic. Topics are distributed very carefully, you can follow the topics/talks without missing other topics you are interested. (Actually I missed one talk I want to listen, but it is overlapping with another, but I know that scheduling is a very hard problem with tons of constraints.)
Keynotes are fascinating. I like my Raspberry PI, Eben Upton was there and gave a keynote. I like Guido, of course he was there for a keynote. I wanted to listen Jessica McKellar, um, she wasn’t there since having a family health problem, I hope everyone is okay. Raymond Hettinger gave a talk, he is a great man with a lot of humility. Find some talks of him on Youtube and watch. PSF Chairman Van Lindberg was here and announcing that we won the Python trademark dispute is over! (They gave every attandee a Raspberry Pi, which was awesome also)
There is a huge area which you can go and have chat with people from different companies and sponsors. Also there is a poster session, and of course lightning talks. This is the kind which I like most. Because most of the hackers don’t have much time for presentation preparations, perhaps some is ashamed in front of the crowds. But in lightning talks, everyone can talks about his project for 5 minutes. If you are bored when listening, just quickly check your Twitter and next speaker arrives.
Third, Financial Aid
They paid all my expenses from PyCon budget. Actually they delivered 100000 dollars as financial aid. That was, AWESOME.
Details, Fork my Dongle Drama
This is discussed a lot and got famous. Actually this event is not what happened in PyCon. Lots of things happened in PyCon, but this is a very small inconvenience. Most of the people at conference even doesn’t know anything about this. But Adria Richards made this famous. She was trying to make women comfortable in tech conferences, but she made everyone uncomfortable.
There are 4 different women organizations at PyCon: PyLadies, Women Who Code, CodeChix, Ada Initiative. 20 per cent of attendees are women. That’s what happened in PyCon.
Also Girls Who Code made a website http://forkmydongle.com/ and selling Fork My Dongle t-shirts. That’s the spirit.
Guido Section:
I had a small chat with Guido about twenty minutes, I like him. I know he doesn’t like photo taking, but I made it.
Comparison to EuroPython:
I attended EuroPython 2012, in Florence. EuroPython is big, but you know, PyCon is huge. I think the major reason of this is closeness to San Francisco. It is very easy to join PyCon for startups, it is just weekend, you can take your car and drive 45 minutes to arrive PyCon, or you can buy a CalTrain ticket for 7 dollars and read a book for two hours. Europe is far from San Francisco, it is not cheap to go there, it needs more time to arrive. EuroPython has 800 developers. I just loved EuroPython, I loved PyCon more.
Summary:
PyCon was better than very good. I had no problems, met a lot of developers at breakfast and lunch. Next year it is going to be in Montreal, Canada, probably, I’ll attend the next one.
P.S. Meet with Louis Goessling, who is a great hacke and made Serpint Project, which enables remotely controlling Raspberry Pi GPIO ports over a network socket or serial port. This is a picture with Guido.
Every taxi driver claims that the most crowded settlers of Istanbul came from their hometown. It can be absurd sometimes, such as: “There are millions of people from Sivas in Kadikoy” or “2 millions of people came to Istanbul from my 200.000 population small city”
While I was investigating the datas from Turkish Statistical Institute, I saw istanbul internal emigration statistics. I wrote a script which produces 2 Turkey maps.
1st Map shows how many people is living in Istanbul from different cities. As can be seen, there are mostly Sivassian people living in Istanbul.
2nd Map shows people who were born in Istanbul, but currently living in other cities. It shows us Istanbul people goes to Ankara, Izmir or Antalya mostly.
Maps, scripts and datas are in this Github repo:
https://github.com/samet/istanbul-demographic-statistics
Here is the place I took the raw datas:
http://getir.net/lc0u
I took notes from the seminars, I put here:
1. Session: Bleeding Edge with HTML5 – Paul Kinlan
@Paul_kinlan
• Details/summary tag
• input tag type range/number
• output tag
• mark tag
• input tag-x-webkit-speech
• Chrome can prerender pages (link rel prerender)
• navigator.onLine
• Gamepadconnected/Gamepadbuttondown events
• navigation.registerProtocolHandler
• webintents.org/share
• document.querySelector(‘img’)
• document.body.onpaste
• plugin free camera/mic access navigator.getUserMedia
• element.webkitRequestFullscreen
• webrtc plugin free realtime communication
• Webrtc.org
• Webrtc.org/code
• chromestatus.com
• Here is his presentation files: bleedinghtml5.appspot.com
2. Session Making your Web Apps Accessible using HTML5 – Sam Dutton
• Chromevox
• Chromeshades
3. Session: HTML5 Web Apps – Paul Kinlan
• io-reader.com
• Kinlan-presentations.appspot.com
• Sproutcore
• Backbone.js
• Sass
• Ext js 4
• Less
• google identity toolkit
• 3dtin.com
• formfactorjs.com
• note:mir.aculo.us
• leviroutes.com
• window.requestFileSystem
• manifest=”cache.appcache”
• lawnchair simple json storage
• web workers
• modernizr
• appmator
4. Session:Developer Tools – Sam Dutton
• Samdutton.com/istanbul
• framegrabber extension
• $0
• keys($0)
• $x(“//*[@style]“)
• copy()
• $$(“li”)
• performance object in console
• shift enter magic in console
Learning something is a source of happiness for me. I don’t know if I’ll be happy after I die. Let me show you a different approach:
To live: It requires too must physical activity. (Let’s call this Fy) It requires relatively small mental activity.(Let’s call this Zy)
To decide to die: Requires too much mental activity. (Let’s call this Zo) . But it requires relatively small physical activity. (Let’s call this Fo)
Let P(happy) is the probability of being happy after dead. Let P(unhappy) is the probability of being unhappy after dead.
Here is the Math:
If I don’t do and just continue to living, here is the effort which I must spend:
Ey = Fy + Zy
If I decide to die:
Eo = Fo + Zo
For me, physical activity is cheap, mental activity is too expensive.
Zx >> Fx
We don’t know what happens after dead:
P(happy) + P(unhappy) = 1
I suppose this:
P(happy) = P(unhappy)
Then P(happy) = 1/2
P(unhappy) = 1/2
Let’s calculate effort for tossing a coin:
Physical activity: too small
Mental activity: 0
Possibilities of tossing a coin:
P(heads) = 1/2
P(tails) = 1/2
So we can say:
P(happy) = P(unhappy) = P(heads) = P(tails)
Cost for learning what happens after that is Eo, and it is much much bigger then to live and see what happens, Ey. After tossing a coin, cost of learning the result is Ep and it is very cheap because it contains a very small amount of physical activity and no mental activity. So that:
Eo >> Ey ~= Ep (Eo is much much bigger than Ey, and Ey is very close to Ep)
If I pay the cost for dying, what I get is P(happy)
If I pay the cost for tossing, what I get is P(heads)
P(happy) = P(heads)
I don’t want to pay very high costs for the same amount of information. Instead, I do a different action which is giving same amount of information, I am tossing a coin.
We rode bicycle with Neslihan, here is the route:
Maslak-Istinye-Sahilden Besiktas-Barbaros-4. levent
We rode 20.3 kilometers with an average speed of 9 km/h in 2 hours and 14 minutes.
We Pass Across Bosphorus Bridge on Bicycle
Yesterday was World Environment Day. Municipal borough allowd bicycles to pass bridge. There were about 3000 people. Here is the route:
Taksim -> Osmanbey -> Mecidiyekoy -> Gayrettepe -> Balmumcu -> Kopru -> Uskudar -> Harem
We rode about 19 kilometers. The weather is too hot, same as last year.
We have 2 water turtles in office, I don’t know their names.
Last week we have a 3 day holiday, feeding turtles became a problem. We prepared mechanism to feed them: We put their food into a piece of paper, stick that paper to two mobile phones. When phones are ringing, they are vibrating and food goes to turtles. Feeding problem solved.
Let’s prepare a virtual setup, let’s have only 1 turtle which dies if it doesn’t eat a whole day, but doesn’t die from any other reason. Let’s put food to paper again, stick it to mobile phone. But this time, mobile phone’s battery is about to die. In this virtual setup, we cannot feed virtual turtle without calling that phone. If we don’t call, turtle will definitely die. If we call, phone can shut down because of charge without enough vibrating.
We know that, if we don’t call, turtle will die. But if we don’t call, turtle is dead and alive at the same time for us.
Long live Erwin Schrödinger.
