Tasdik Rahman

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PyCon Taiwan 2017, Taipei

12 Jun 2017 #conferences #python PyCon Taiwan 2017, Taipei

I have been going to PyCon India since the 2014 edition and have only missed PyCon Pune, the new regional PyCon that we have which was held at the start of this year. 

Every year? Yes. But why? I dunno, maybe because I love python too much? Also partly because it’s the only time in the year where I get to meet all my friends in the Python community.

But this year was a little different.

This was the first year when I was going to a PyCon being held in a different country altogether and I would be lying if I said I was not excited about it.

Another reason to be excited was

Yes. This was the first time I would be speaking in PyCon! I was going to share the stage with some great developers and that was also a scary thought in itself.

Crazy right? I know and I was pumped!

I mean what if I fumble up, make some dumb mistake or what if I get a stage fear while presenting?

Genuine questions but I was not thinking of any of the above when I started my trip from Bangalore

Travelling for a whole day straight does take toll on your body. And oh boy, the body aches!

Day 1

The keynote was given by Hsuan-Tien Lin who is working at appier right now. His talk revolved around the choices one should make while building an AI system.

This was followed by another keynote by Carol Willing which revolved around python for education highlighting recent innovations from Science, Data Science, web, and electronics (Raspberry Pi, MicroPython and CircuitPython) as well as a brief recap of innovative ideas from PyCon in Portland.

The talks I attended that day were Python module in rust and Understanding Serverless Architecture. The rust talk was positioned more off as an intro to the language itself and how it was somewhat similar in terms of packaging and distribution of modules with Python. There are quite few more things which I noticed were very similar like Rust Lambda was very similar to Python’s lamda’s. It got real interesting when the speaker went into the details of how we could use rust code inside python just like how someone usually uses cffi, cpython or ctypes for achieving the same.

The server less talk delved into how one would leverage the new architectural styles. Which would be not having a server at all! Crazy stuff I would say and a great talk by my friend Rohit

Day 1 ended with all the speakers and organisers for PyCon Taiwan heading to the speaker night being held at Courtyard Taipei. And the food was delightful.

Day 2

Andrew Godwin gave his keynote which revolved around a discussion about how most software is never designed with failure in mind, and the consequences can range from slightly annoying to life-threatening. He gave an insight about how the industry has already tackled failure incredibly effectively—aviation—and what lessons we can learn from it and apply to our own code both locally and distributed.

Some other talks which I attended were Global Interpreter Lock: Episode III - cat < /dev/zero > GIL and Why do projects fail? Let’s talk about the story of Sinon.PY

Later that day we had PyNight which started with a brief performance by my friend Adrian and he plays really good!

I finally got to have a chat with Andrew and Russell and it was a fanboy moment for me

Day 3

As we headed to the last day of the conference, we started with a keynote by Russell where he discussed about the lessons we can learn from the past and present of open source communities, so that we can ensure we have a strong, healthy Python community going into the future.

The only talk I could attend that day was “enjoy type hinting and its benefits”.

I was mostly making some last minute changes to the slides for my talk slotted for the afternoon session.

I was happy that I had finally given my talk! :)

And it was a wrap up for PyCon Taiwan 2017.

I had a great time and made amazing friends. Adrian, Tzu, Keith, Mike, Yahsin and I missing out a lot of names in this list.

You will be missed Taiwan!