On a recent flight I watched a few talks from the last PyCon US, and figured I’d share them here. They are in no particular order, and omission of your favorite talk from this list does not imply that I hated it or whatever—I almost certainly merely haven’t actually watched it (yet).
Keeping up with Python: what makes upgrades hard, and what can we do about it (talk page) by Jason Fried makes a compelling case to write code in a manner friendly to Python upgrades. I would’ve loved more examples, but it was still interesting.
How to build a cross-platform graphical user interface with Python (talk page) by Russell Keith-Magee is an overview of some tooling available for cross-platform GUI development in Python. BeeWare is fantastic and we should all be more involved in the effort.
Program Your Own Computer in Python (talk page) by Glyph promotes the very idea of writing more (Python) software that runs on our own machines, along with some very practical information on how to actually do so. Highly recommended.
Design Pressure: The Invisible Hand That Shapes Your Code (talk page) by Hynek Schlawack in a sense talks about how our tool choices impact our design, and how to avoid that impact being overbearing and unconstructive. Lots of food for thought for me in this one.
Unlearning SQL (talk page) by Steven Lott was an interesting watch, since I’m currently headed in the opposite direction! The talk promotes not (ab)using SQL databases as temporary data stores and instead writing more data transformation logic in Python, and these days I work a lot with raw SQL and am constantly learning how to get the database to do more work for me so I don’t have to post-processing in Python.
The Zen of Polymorphism: Choosing between isinstance(), methods, and @singledispatch (talk page) by Brett Slatkin looks at the various ways of solving the variations on a theme problem of needing multiple implementations of multiple but ultimately same bits of functionality. I’m intrigued by @singledispatch now.
The keynote by Lynn Root was a lovely personal story about the importance and value of play. V. important message.
Enjoy!
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