Talks Presented at Kiwi PyCon 2011

Showing 36 of 36

• • How does this code work?
  • Jeff Rush
  • ...
• • Code quality; patch quality
  • Malcolm Tredinnick
  • For beginner to intermediate coders wishing to become more involved in open source projects and calm their own nerves.
• • Working with External Components
  • Tim McNamara
  • What does it mean for Python to be a glue language? This talk attempts to show how to make your code work well with other languages, programs, processes, modules and databases.
• • A Python Takeover
  • Mark Ramm
  • Why and How SourceForge changed to Python from PHP and how it affected what they could offer their users
• • Asynchronous MOM in the ZeroMQ and RabbitMQ Family
  • Guy Kloss
  • Distributed architectures are often (mostly?) based on a service oriented architecture (web services). For certain applications this synchronous approach is not that suitable, and an asynchronous approach using messaging or event notification means is better. One such concept uses the AMQP protocol (specification finalised this year), bringing all kinds of "enterprise features" to the show. A popular and easy to use implementation for it is RabbitMQ, making it easily accessible through Python and umpteen other languages. AMQP systems all require a message broker, with all its fancy benefits, but as well introducing another component towards higher complexity. A simpler approach is to use *no* message broker: ZeroMQ. The concepts of ZeroMQ are as well briefly introduced. The talks is to provide a broad overview of the different technologies, rather than giving in depth perspectives. It should provide some basic knowledge on possibilities and limitations, to evaluate whether and where the technologies could be usefully employed.
• • Introducing Sloecode: a python-based, installable code-forge.
  • Thomi Richards
  • Sloecode is an open source, installable code-forge written in python. This talk will cover the design goals of the project, technical challenges and implementation details, and future goals.
• • Relate or !Relate
  • Mark Ramm
  • To Relate or Not to Relate, that is the question raised by the NoSQL movement. There is a lot of buzz about Couch, Casandra, MongoDB, and other non relational databases, but they are competing against the decades of hard work that's gone into optimizing databases built around the relational model.
• • Python and the Web: Can We Keep Up?
  • Audrey Roy
  • The web is changing fast. First, we'll briefly retrace the history of Python and the web, starting with the first Python web app, then progressing through the CGI and WSGI years. We'll analyze current Python web issues, describe where we're on the right track, and study areas where we ought to shift attention. Where is the web going? Is the Python web going in the same direction? What can we, as active members of the Python community, do to help ensure that Python will keep up?
• • Python Worst Practices
  • Daniel Greenfeld
  • Python is a well defined, multi-paradigm, dynamically typed,, relatively fast programming language that is designed to be both easy to learn and yet provides many avenues to advanced programming techniques. The philosophy of "We're all consenting adults" has led to some amazing projects. Unfortunately, sometimes developer enthusiasm for the capabilities for Python (or other languages) causes some unfortunate mistakes to be made. This talk will go over programming techniques best left out of python development. These are the tricks and techniques you can use to make your Python code and career unmanageable, hence guaranteeing a place in your agency/company/organization until the universe suffers heat death.
• • The magic of metaprogramming
  • Jeff Rush
  • Learn the magic of metaprogramming in Python.
• • Python on a chip
  • Jeremy Stott
  • Python-on-a-chip is a project to develop PyMite, a Python Virtual Machine running a subset of the Python language on microcontrollers. This talk demonstrates how to, why to, and what you can do with PyMite.
• • Behaviour Driven Development
  • Malcolm Tredinnick
  • A "get up and get going" introduction to behaviour driven development and how easily it fits into normal Python code. Some ideas to help break the logjam of working out how to get started validating code against a list of requirements.
• • Python distributed programming using gevent and redis
  • Alex Dong
  • Trunk.ly launched as a half baked product when Yahoo announced its plan to "sunset" delicious. Within 2 days, 5000 users sign up with the service. In order to deal with the huge demands, we spun off 10+ EC2 instances to crunch through the links. Alex rewrote the crawler architecture using gevent and redis. Reducing the total number of servers to 2. Saving $3000 per month. This talk is about the framework and architecture used in the rewrite.
• • Python in the Clouds
  • Breccan McLeod-Lundy
  • An overview of what Cloud means today, how clouds are being used today, how python developers can interact with them, and a brief look at where we might be able to expect clouds to be going in the near future.
• • Document Classification using the Natural Language Toolkit
  • Ben Healey
  • An introduction to automated classification using the machine learning modules in NLTK. Particular focus on building a naive Bayesian classifier. Example documents discussed may include Tweets, the Enron emails, or Trademe product descriptions (to be decided).
• • Those niggly beginner's questions answered by a code craft ninja.
  • Tim Penhey
  • Talk delivered in a question and answer format, with pre-prepared questions and answers.
• • Porting (and staying ported) to Python 3
  • Leon Matthews
  • Strategies both for porting your project to Python 3 and, crucially, keeping the port alive and well after the initial porting effort has been completed.
• • Struggling to Find an Open Source Business Model
  • Grant Paton-Simpson
  • After more than 45,000 downloads, the open source Python project SOFA Statistics has netted $90 (not $90k, just $90). This presentation will explain strategies tried so far, and the options available to open source projects.
• • Testing in those hard to reach places
  • Lee Begg
  • Some modules are hard to test. In this presentation, we will look at an example, showing some neat tricks for database and network testing.
• • Giving your website a command line interface
  • Michael Hudson-Doyle
  • Your system has a wonderful web interface, but you also need to interact with it from the command line, or programmatically in general. How can you do this securely and flexibly?
• • Introduction to Matplotlib for Data Analysis
  • Catherine Thwaites
  • This talk covers what matplotlib is, why use it and how to install it. We'll be covering simple examples that will allow you to get started, but also display the strengths of the matplotlib package. I spend most of my day writing queries using Jade and SQL. Here, we use matplotlib as part of my work for exploratory data analysis and display and explaination of complicated data. I presented this topic at my local linux group. This month someone showed me a graph they had done using matplotlib, after my talk.
• • A tour of the One Laptop per Child API
  • Clinton Roy
  • The One Laptop per Child project seeks to create a cheap and sturdy laptop for children in the developing world. The hardware created for the project is unique and requires unique APIs to make use of its hardware.
• • New Zealand Python User Group - The Whats, the Whys and the Hows
  • Danny Adair
  • I would like to introduce the audience to the concepts around NZPUG, why it is important to organise Python representation in New Zealand, and what they have to do with it.
• • Mitmproxy: an SSL-capable intercepting proxy
  • Aldo Cortesi
  • Mitmproxy (http://mitmproxy.org) is an SSL-capable man-in-the-middle proxy for web developers and penetration testers, written in Python. I'll cover mitmproxy's development and use, and show off some real-world results obtained with it.
• • Automated testing in Python and beyond
  • Brenda Wallace
  • A short intro to unitest and why they are so good for you,
• • Better random numbers for python
  • Douglas Bagnall
  • Contrary to oft voiced opinion, the MT19937 random number generator used by Python is not the best one ever invented. It is, in fact, not even the fourth best generator by its own authors. This talk points out its weaknesses and describes a dozen or so drop-in replacement modules that produce faster and less predictable random numbers using really well tested and analysed algorithms and implementations. Some of the replacements have cryptographic origins, while others were written specifically to address problems in MT19937. Code is at http://github.com/douglasbagnall/riffle.
• • Spotlight on Python
  • Nic Cave-Lynch
  • Covers development and use of a Python-powered system designed for lighting bands in small venues. Covers (among other things): the problems of lighting bands; the development process; the results; lessons learned.
• • Simple operations in a complex environment
  • Teijo Holzer
  • This is a technical discussion about how seemingly simple operations become difficult when running in a large scale, complex production environment. (File operations, signal handling and process management)
• • Python in the VFX Pipeline at Weta Digital
  • Dave Kujawski
  • High level overview of Python programming at Weta Digital. How Python is used to facilitate production goals in the VFX pipeline.
• • Patterns in Python
  • Glenn Ramsey
  • The comment that design patterns are redundant in a well designed language is sometimes made. Python implements several important and well known patterns in the core language but several are not represented. This talk will present a survey of common design patterns and will focus on how to implement those that are not supported in the language. Knowing how common patterns are implemented in Python will help programmers familiar with other languages to transfer their expertise to Python.
• • Pythonic wrapping using SWIG
  • Olly Betts
  • SWIG generates wrappers around C and C++ libraries for Python and other languages. This presentation will show how a few easy tweaks can produce a much more natural Python API.
• • OpenERP - A python based ERP for small business
  • Graeme Gellatly
  • OpenERP is a comprehensive business application including Sales, CRM, Project management, Warehouse management, Manufacturing, Financial management and more. This talk will give a brief introduction to OpenERP from both a functional and technical perspective.
• • Django for n00bs
  • Jen Zajac
  • A beginners introduction to the possibilities of the Django web framework, with a demonstration of a simple app.
• • Asynchronous and Evented programming in Python
  • Aurynn Shaw
  • Discussion of techniques behind event-driven programming, code structure, and working with popular evented Python libraries.
• • Shipping at the Speed of Life
  • Corey Donohoe
  • The talk will go into the "Ship It™" culture that's a big part of GitHub. How we use the git scm to help us deploy features fast and respond to problems on the site in a timely fashion.
• • How to suck at developing a web app, when you’re not a web shop. (Subtitled “Friends, contracts, and missed deadlines.”)
  • Eric Light
  • An overview of some of our most blatant failings when we attempted to develop a cloud-app through an external contractor, coming from a suitably-embarrassed business owner and ex law student.