Sessions at PyCodeConf 2011 matching your filters

It is vitally important that we take a break from the rush of our day-to-day lives and look back at what Python was, is, and is meant to become. Whether you have used Python from the beginning or just picking it up, this talk is for you as we will hit all the big major topics of the community and the language. This is more than a survey of Python, this is a call to action to focus on the greatness of the language. A call to stop the complaining and bitter infighting, to band together as a community in order to fulfill the vision of the language. It is up to us to turn the tide of FUD. It is up to us to be inspired and to be inspirational. The future is bright.

The much maligned Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) never gets any respect---in fact most Python programmers don't even think it has a right to exist. In this talk, I'll defend the GIL by making the case that improving it might be a more attractive (and achievable) option than trying to get rid of it entirely. I'll discuss some of my past efforts to understand the GIL, describe weaknesses in the current Python 3 implementation, and give some practical programming advice for working around it.

In a world of many programming languages, the popularity of Python continues to grow without bound. We examine what makes it special and how it influences the way we program:

• what gives python its texture and feel
• what features support rapid development
• where does the readability come from
• what features support economy of expression
• look at the mix of lightweight tools and industrial grade tools
• how easy is it to learn python? how hard is it to master
• what can python do that other languages can't
• what is the role of the python community
• why does the license matter
• does python just have zen or is there a python attitude?

Every day, Mozilla collects three million Firefox crash reports from around the world. The data in these reports drives the bug-fixing priorities of Firefox engineers, and is critical to understanding the stability of our platform. In this case study, I'll describe the challenges we've faced and the architecture and infrastructure we use to process, store, and analyze approximately 110TB of crash reports using Python, with Hadoop, PostgreSQL, and a few other things thrown in for good measure.

Invaluable tools like Github, readthedocs.org, Packaginator, and PyPI have been of incredible value to the Python community. Each iteration of these tools has seen a step forward in a direction of shared code and putting the spotlight on new projects. Yet critical pieces are missing. Can the Python community successfully address these issues and perhaps share them with the rest of the technical world?

Python now has a mature and easy-to-use dependency management and isolation tools in the form of Virtualenv and Pip/Pyg. All applications should be using these. In this talk, we'll see why using Virtualenv + Pip or Pyg brings a plethora of benefits, from ramping up new developers to automation in the cloud. Key points and take aways will include:

• Getting new developers set up with an app and with python is much easier when dependencies are declared through the standard format of requirements.txt.
• Explicit dependency declaration enables rapid bootstrapping and deployment to the cloud.
• Dependency management for python rightly belongs within python! You can manage dependencies with Chef or Puppet, but this is a Python app -- let's do it with Python.
• How the Python community can continue to support these tools and improve the tools to make the experience even better than it is today.

In summary, you're crazy if you're not completely and explicitly declaring your dependencies with Pip or Pyg and isolating them with Virtualenv.