Sessions at PyCon Finland 2011 about Python

Monday 17th October 2011

• from __magic__ import wtf

  by Tommie Gannert

  Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Python provides facilities like __metaclass__, __getattr__, __call__, and others which allow programmers to do a lot of clever stuff. This magical code is fun to write, concise, and can be quite elegant. However, too much magic is dangerous, particularly in library code. You may think your code is clever and fun, but your colleague trying to maintain it or re-use it in another project later will probably be confused and annoyed by much thought is needed to understand what the heck your fancy code is doing. We will discuss finding the balance between fun magic and boring but clear with some examples of questionable magic we've encountered in Spotify's Python corpus.

  • Python

  At 10:00am to 10:45am, Monday 17th October

  Coverage slide deck video

• Python for Data Science

  by Harri Hämäläinen

  The amount of data available to us is growing rapidly, but what is required to make useful conclusions out of it? During this presentation we are going to learn how to use Python as your tool for data science. The presentation will go through the phases most often required when working with real-world data.

  Outline
  1. Different tactics to gather your data
  2. Cleansing, scrubbing, correcting your data
  3. Running analysis for your data
  4. Bring your data to live with visualizations
  5. Publishing your data for rest of us as linked open data

  The presentation is for those of us brave enough to enter the valley of wild data and face the horrors of uncertainty. It's an introductory presentation but people with experience of doing similar things with Python or some other tool such as R are also warmly welcome to participate the discussion.

  • Data Mining
  • Data Visualization
  • Open Data
  • Python

  At 11:00am to 11:45am, Monday 17th October

  Coverage slide deck video

• Replacing Spreadsheets with Django

  by Teemu Kurppa

  • Django
  • Python

  At 11:00am to 11:45am, Monday 17th October

  Coverage video

• Robot Framework

  by Janne Härkönen and Pekka Klärck

  An adhoc presentation on Robot Framework at PyCon Finland

  • Python
  • Quality Assurance

  At 2:00pm to 2:45pm, Monday 17th October

  Coverage video video

• Understanding Encodings

  by Ezio Melotti

  Working with Unicode and encodings might be confusing, but every
  developer must know how they work.
  Even if the full Unicode standard is actually quite complex, only a
  few basic concepts are really necessary to work with Python and
  Unicode:
  * the differences between Unicode strings and bytes;
  * how encodings are used to store characters;
  * the differences between different encodings;
  * how to understand Unicode-related errors;

  This talk aims to explain these concept.
  Best practices for using Unicode, the current status of Unicode in
  Python 2 and 3, and the plans for the future (e.g. PEP393 - Flexible
  string representation) will also be discussed.
  The talk is suitable for both new developers that are not yet familiar
  with Unicode and for experienced developers that want to understand
  better what's going on under the hood.

  • Encodings
  • Python
  • Python 3
  • Unicode

  At 2:00pm to 2:45pm, Monday 17th October

  Coverage video slide deck