TITLE: PyCon Day 3
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 24, 2023  2:54 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 The last day of a conference is often a wildcard.  If it ends early
 enough, I can often drive or fly home afterward, which means that I
 can attend all of the conference activities.  If not, I have to
 decide between departing the next day or cutting out early.  When
 possible, I stay all day.  Sometimes, as with StrangeLoop, I can
 stay all day, skip only the closing keynote, and drive home into
 the night.

 With virtual PyCon, I decided fairly early on that I would not be
 able to attend most of the last day.  This is Sunday, I have family
 visiting, and work looms on the horizon for Monday.  An afternoon
 talk or two is all I will be able to manage.

 <b>Talk 1: A Pythonic Full-Text Search</b>

 The idea of this talk was to use common Python tools to implement
 full-text search of a corpus.  It turns out that the talk focused
 on websites, and thus on tools common to Python web developers:
 PostgreSQL and Django.  It also turns out that
 <tt>django.contrib.postgres</tt> provides lots of features for
 doing search out of the box.  This talk showed how to use them.

 This was an interesting talk, but not immediately useful to me.
 I don't work with Django, and I use SQLite more often then
 PostgreSQL for my personal work.  There may be some support for
 search in <tt>django.contrib.sqlite</tt>, if it exists, but the
 speaker said that I'd likely have to implement most of the
 search functionality myself.  Even so, I enjoyed seeing what was
 possible with modules already available.

 <b>Talk 2: Using Python to Help the Unhoused</b>

 I thought I was done for the conference, but I decided I could
 listen in one one more talk while making dinner.  This
 non-technical session sounded interesting:

 <blockquote><em>
 How a group of volunteers from around the globe use Python to help
 an NGO in Victoria, BC, Canada to help the unhoused.  By building
 a tool to find social media activity on unhoused in the Capitol
 Region, the NGO can use a dashboard of results to know where to
 move their limited resources.
 </em></blockquote>

 With my attention focused on the Sri Lankan dal with coconut-lime
 kale in my care, I didn't take detailed notes this time, but I did
 learn about the existence of
 <a href="https://www.statisticswithoutborders.org">
    Statistics Without Borders</a>,
 which sounds like a cool public service group that needs to exist
 in 2023.  Otherwise, the project involved scraping Twitter as a
 source of data about the needs of the homeless in Victoria, and
 using sentiment analysis to organize the data.  Filtering the data
 to zero in on relevant data was their biggest challenge, as
 keyword filters passed through many false positives.

 At this point, the developers have given their app to the NGO and
 are looking forward to receiving feedback, so that they can make
 any improvements that might be needed.

 This is a nice project by folks giving back to their community, and
 a nice way to end the conference.

 ~~~~~

 I was a PyCon first-timer, attending virtually.  The conference talks
 were quite good.  Thanks to everyone who organized the conference and
 created such a complete online experience.  I didn't use all of the
 features available, but what I did use worked well, and the people
 were great.  I ended up with links to several Python projects to try
 out, a few example scripts for PyScript and Mermaid that I cobbled
 together after the talks, and lots of syntactic abstractions to
 explore.  Three days well spent.
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