Question would be, what didn’t I learned at EuroPython! Being a Python fan attending his first Python centric conference, I was anxious for what I would make out of it!
So here I am, after the final day of the conference, sitting in my hotel room, remembering the themes that stuck in my head. Sure that for the past year I’ve been working mainly around Django and there were a few talks about it, but the themes that stuck were TDD, multi-processing, concurrency, non-blocking applications and the alternatives to CPython, mainly PyPy.
Test driven development was something I had already tried and used on day to day over 2 years ago, but got lost in time somehow. It’s obvious that all the cool kids on the block do this, some even practice with Code Katas and in Coding Dojos. So out with the dust, I did some small coding over this days on 3 or 4 projects, all following TDD. Not so rusty after all!
As for multi-processing, the rule is simple, in multi core systems, use whenever possible. Better support for it is also coming to Python, yay. To contrast, using threads is “playing O.S.” and due to the huge overhead in context switching, you shouldn’t use them altogether.
So concurrency and non blocking applications, I attended two talks that touched this subject, one for Tornado and other for Gevent. Tornado seamed efficient, but awfully simple and probably dead project. The speaker couldn’t really explain what you could get out of it that you wouldn’t get with Twisted. Gevent on the other hand, seamed to really convince the audience. While I don’t have a solid opinion, the concept seamed appealing to me and I will take it for a spin.
PyPy was also frequently heard throughout the conference, once again, something I should probably pay more attention to, can’t tell that much for now, other than it’s promising and saw some cool usages of it, otherwise impossible under CPython.
Summing up, learned plenty, most of which I didn’t even state here, feeling inspired and I now have a loooot of new things to experiment. Now if I can just find the time to do it that would be awesome!
One last word of appreciation to the organization, that other then the unpleasant Wi-Fi connection problems, did an amazing job putting everything together.
See you at EuroPython 2011 at Florence!
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gevent certainly looked pretty cool – it’s on my list of things to take a look at. I came away with a huge list of things from the conference I want to explore!
I feel your “pain” the list is long, but it means that the effort of attending the conference was well worth it!
nice blog entry, see you in Florence !