Sometimes, I run across a sentence I wish I had written. Here are several paragraphs by Dan Bouk I would be proud to have written.
Museums offer a place to practice looking for and acknowledging beauty. This is, mostly, why I visit them.
As I wander from room to room, a pose diverts me, a glance attracts me, or a flash of color draws my eye. And then I look, and look, and look, and then move on.
Outside the museum, I find that this training sticks. I wander from subway car to platform, from park to city street, and a pose diverts me, a glance attracts me, or a flash of color draws my eye. People of no particular beauty reveal themselves to be beautiful. It feels as though I never left the museum, and now everything, all around me, is art.
This way of seeing persists, sometimes for days on end. It resonates with and reinforces my political commitment to the equal value of each of my neighbors. It vibrates with my belief in the divine spark, the image of God, that animates every person.
-- Dan Bouk, in On Walking to the Museum, Musing on Beauty and Safety
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.
Talk 1: A Pythonic Full-Text Search
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 django.contrib.postgres 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 django.contrib.sqlite, 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.
Talk 2: Using Python to Help the Unhoused
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:
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.
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 Statistics Without Borders, 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.
Another way that attending a virtual conference is like the in-person experience: you can oversleep, or lose track of time. After a long morning of activity before the time-shifted start of Day 2, I took a nap before the 11:45 talk, and...
Talk 1: Python's Syntactic Sugar
Grrr. I missed the first two-thirds of this talk, which I greatly anticipated, but I slept longer than I planned. My body must have needed more than I was giving it.
I saw enough of the talk, though, to know I want to watch the video on YouTube when it shows up. This topic is one of my favorite topics in programming languages: What is the smallest set of features we need to implement the rest of the language? The speaker spent a couple of years implementing various Python features in terms of others, and arrived at a list of only ten that he could not translate away. The rest are sugar. I missed the list at the beginning of the talk, but I gathered a few of its members in the ten minutes I watched: while, raise, and try/except.
I love this kind of exercise: "How can you translate the statement if X: Y into one that uses only core features?" Here's one attempt the speaker gave:
try:
while X:
Y
raise _DONE
except _DONE:
None
I was today days old when I learned that Python's bool subclasses int, that True == 1, and that False == 0. That bit of knowledge was worth interrupting my nap to catch the end of the talk. Even better, this talk was based on a series of blog posts. Video is okay, but I love to read and play with ideas in written form. This series vaults to the top of my reading list for the coming days.
Talk 2: Subclassing, Composition, Python, and You
Okay, so this guy doesn't like subclasses much. Fair enough, but... some of his concerns seem to be more about the way Python classes work (open borders with their super- and subclasses) than with the idea itself. He showed a lot of ways one can go wrong with arcane uses of Python subclassing, things I've never thought to do with a subclass in my many years doing OO programming. There are plenty of simpler uses of inheritance that are useful and understandable.
Still, I liked this talk, and the speaker. He was honest about his biases, and he clearly cares about programs and programmers. His excitement gave the talk energy. The second half of the talk included a few good design examples, using subclassing and composition together to achieve various ends. It also recommended the book Architecture Patterns with Python. I haven't read a new software patterns book in a while, so I'll give this one a look.
Toward the end, the speaker referenced the line "Software engineering is programming integrated over time." Apparently, this is a Google thing, but it was new to me. Clever. I'll think on it.
Talk 3: How We Are Making CPython Faster -- Past, Present and Future
I did not realize that, until Python 3.11, efforts to make the interpreter had been rather limited. The speaker mentioned one improvement made in 3.7 to optimize the typical method invocation, obj.meth(arg), and one in 3.8 that sped up global variable access by using a cache. There are others, but nothing systematic.
At this point, the talk became mutually recursive with the Friday talk "Inside CPython 3.11's New Specializing, Adaptive Interpreter". The speaker asked us to go watch that talk and return. If I were more ambitious, I'd add a link to that talk now, but I'll let you any of you are interested to visit yesterday's post and scroll down two paragraphs.
He then continued with improvements currently in the works, including:
He also mentions possible improvements related to C extension code, but I didn't catch the substance of this one. The speaker offered the audience a pithy takeaway from his talk: Python is always getting faster. Do the planet a favor and upgrade to the latest version as soon as you can. That's a nice hook.
There was lots of good stuff here. Whenever I hear compiler talks like this, I almost immediately start thinking about how I might work some of the ideas into my compiler course. To do more with optimization, we would have to move faster through construction of a baseline compiler, skipping some or all of the classic material. That's a trade-off I've been reluctant to make, given the course's role in our curriculum as a compilers-for-everyone experience. I remain tempted, though, and open to a different treatment.
Talk 4: The Lost Art of Diagrams: Making Complex Ideas Easy to See with Python
Early on, this talk contained a line that programmers sometimes need to remember: Good documentation shows respect for users. Good diagrams, said the speaker, can improve users' lives. The talk was a nice general introduction to some of the design choices available to us as we create diagrams, including the use of color, shading, and shapes (Venn diagrams, concentric circles, etc.). It then discussed a few tools one can use to generate better diagrams. The one that appealed most to me was Mermaid.js, which uses a Markdown-like syntax that reminded me of GraphViz's Dot language. My students and use GraphViz, so picking up Mermaid might be a comfortable task.
~~~~~
My second day at virtual PyCon confirmed that attending was a good choice. I've seen enough language-specific material to get me thinking new thoughts about my courses, plus a few other topics to broaden the experience. A nice break from the semester's grind.
One of great benefits of a virtual conference is accessibility. I can hop from Iowa to Salt Lake City with the press of a button. The competing cost to virtual conference is that I am accessible ... from elsewhere.
On the first day of PyCon, we had a transfer orientation session that required my presence in virtual Iowa from 10:00 AM-12:00 noon local time. That's 9:00-11:00 Mountain time, so I missed Ned Batchelder's keynote and the opening set of talks. The rest of the day, though, I was at the conference. Virtual giveth, and virtual taketh away.
Talk 1: Inside CPython 3.11's New Specializing, Adaptive Interpreter
As I said yesterday, I don't know Python -- tools, community, or implementation -- intimately. That means I have a lot to learn in any talk. In this one, Brandt Bucher discussed the adaptive interpreter that is part of Python 3.11, in particular how the compiler uses specialization to improve its performance based on run-time usage of the code.
Midway through the talk, he referred us to a talk on tomorrow's schedule. "You'll find that the two talks are not only complementary, they're also mutually recursive." I love the idea of mutually recursive talks! Maybe I should try this with two sessions in one of my courses. To make it fly, I will need to make some videos... I wonder how students would respond?
This online Python disassembler by @pamelafox@fosstodon.org popped up in the chat room. It looks like a neat tool I can use in my compiler course. (Full disclosure: I have been following Pamela on Twitter and Mastodon for a long time. Her posts are always interesting!)
Talk 2: Build Yourself a PyScript
PyScript is a Javascript module that enables you to embed Python in a web page, via WebAssembly. This talk described how PyScript works and showed some of the technical issues in writing web apps.
Some of this talk was over my head. I also do not have deep experience programming in the web. It looks like I will end up teaching a beginning web development course this fall (more later), so I'll definitely be learning more about HTML, CSS, and Javascript soon. That will prepare me to be more productive using tools like PyScript.
Talk 3: Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)
Our test suites are often not strong enough to recognize changes in our code. The talk introduced mutation testing, which modifies code to test the suite. I didn't take a lot of notes on this one, but I did make a note to try mutation testing out, maybe in Racket.
Talk 4: Working with Time Zones: Everything You Wish You Didn't Need to Know
Dealing with time zones is one of those things that every software engineer seems to complain about. It's a thorny problem with both technical and social dimensions, which makes it really interesting for someone who loves software design to think about.
This talk opened with example after example of how time zones don't behave as straightforwardly as you might think, and then discussed Python's newest time zone library, pytz.
My main takeaways from this talk: pytz looks useful, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with time zones on a regular basis.
Talk 5: Pythonic Functional (iter)tools for your Data Challenges
This is, of course, a topic after my heart. Functional programming is a big part of my programming languages course, and I like being able to show students Python analogues to the Racket ideas they are learning. There was not much new FP content for me here, but I did learn some new Python functions from itertools that I can use in class -- and in my own code. I enjoyed the Advent of Code segment of the talk, in which the speaker applied Python to some of the 2021 challenges. I use an Advent of Code challenge or two each year in class, too. The early days of the month usually feature fun little problems that my students can understand quickly. They know how to solve them imperatively in Python, but we tackle them functionally in Racket.
Most of the FP ideas needed to solve them in Python are similar, so it was fun to see the speaker solve them using itertools. Toward the end, the solutions got heavy quickly, which must be how some of my students feel when we are solving these problems in class.
~~~~~
Between work in the morning and the conference afternoon and evening, this was a long day. I have a lot of new tools to explore.
Last night, I posted on Mastodon:
Heading off to #PyConUS in the morning, virtually. I just took my first tour of Hubilo, the online platform. There's an awful lot going on, but you need a lot of moving parts to produce the varied experiences available in person. I'm glad that people have taken up the challenge.
Why PyCon? I'm not an expert in the language, or as into the language as I once was with Ruby. Long-time readers may recall that I blogged about attending JRubyConf back in 2012. Here is a link to my first post from that conference. You can scroll up from there to see several more posts from the conference.
However, I do write and read a lot of Python code, because our students learn it early and use it quite a bit. Besides, it's a fun language and has a large, welcoming community. Like many language-specific conferences, PyCon includes a decent number of talks about interpreters, compilers, and tools, which are a big part of my teaching portfolio these days. The conference offers a solid virtual experience, too, which makes it attractive to attend while the semester is still going on.
My goals for attending PyCon this year include:
More about today's talks tomorrow.
There are several revised approaches to "what's the deal with the ring?" presented in "The History of The Lord of the Rings", and, as you read through the drafts, the material just ... slowly gets better! Bit by bit, the familiar angles emerge. There seems not to have been any magic moment: no electric thought in the bathtub, circa 1931, that sent Tolkien rushing to find a pen.
It was just revision.
Then:
... if Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.
-- Robin Sloan, How The Ring Got Good
In a recent blog post, Why Grace Matters (for Software Development), Avdi Grimm tells the story of how he came to name his training site "Graceful.Dev". Check it out. This passage resolves into the answer:
You know, the word "grace" is interesting, because it has two different meanings. On the one hand, it means beauty in lines or in motion. But if you were raised with a religious background anything like mine, you know that grace is also something that saves you.
And in that moment on the dance floor, I realized that these two meanings of grace are really one and the same thing. Because grace is something that makes space for you to screw up, and then turns it into something beautiful.
I don't think I was raised in the same religious tradition as Avdi, but I was raised in a tradition that valued deeply the notion of grace. Grace manifest in sacrament was a powerful notion to me, one of the religious ideas I found most compelling as I was growing up.
That's probably why Avdi's realization strikes close to home for me. I carry the idea of grace present in other parts of my life as part of my cultural DNA. His connection of grace to software feels right. "Grace makes space for you to screw up, and then turns it into something beautiful." -- I imagine that many programmers know this feeling, in an non-religious way, if only vaguely.