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PyTennessee 2015

The second ever PyTennessee just wrapped up and I really enjoyed myself again. It is nice having a great conference to attend in Tennessee. The organizers topped themselves again this year. For the price this conferece is packed with great sessions and as a bonus the food was awesome, provided by sifted. I am just going to run through a couple of my favorites, but I really enjoyed all that I could attend.

Morning Keynote on Saturday

Kyle Kelley knocked it out of the park right at the start. The presentation was about how he used Docker to create ephemeral Jupyter containers. It was a cool concept and also took the picloud model a little further. You get a Docker container to do your processing, so you get anything you want installed, then after you are finished everything is wiped cleaning, protecting your processing and freeing up resources from the host. The possibilities of this are limitless. The other cool part was just the amount of hardware used for the Nature article, 40 cpu cores and 0.5 TB RAM, just astonishing. From a GIS perspective, I think he is on to something.

Marketing for Developers

Craig Kerstiens did a great job of discussing a road map for developers to consider when doing marketing for yourself and your employee.He covered topics from OSS to blogging to presentations.He shared how he tested presentations and shared other tidbits of knowledge like when to post to your blog.If I can find a copy of his slide deck or a video I will post it up. Keep a look out for it as it may show up again.

Analyzing Data with Python

Sarah Guido presented on the libraries that she uses to analyze data. Very informative and a great overview of the basics of each library and how you can use them to analyze large amounts of data. Not a deep dive, but great for me, as I like a good place to get started. Here is her list from what I remember.

Zen and the Art of Python

Calvin Hendryx-Parker from six feet up took the Zen of Python and put it to use with actual code samples from their code base. It was a great display of applying the principles outlined and why those are worthing of being part of the core of Python. If you have know clue what I am talking about then you need to open a terminal and do the following:

$ python

Now that you have a REPL:

$ import this

This is what is known as “The Zen of Python”, built right in and practical for any language.

That’s all for now.

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