I had the opportunity to go to PyCon US this year again. And I’ve been meaning to put down my thoughts about it, but I have managed to distract myself in a million different ways. However I feel I really ought to say what I learned:

PyCon US 2018

I enjoyed PyCon US this year, especially the “hallway” track, and I feel I learned from talking with vendors and going to a few of the open spaces. One of the best parts was meeting up with friends, who I only get to meet at PyCons. But you’d have to be there to understand and experience that. Also I wish I could of stayed for the coding sprints this year. While I did not watch the talks live, I am compiling a list of the talks that I enjoyed from PyCon US 2018 here. Some of the more interesting tidbits I learned:

LinkedIn is experimenting with an interesting alternative to microservices. The best way I can describe it is a single containerized codebase, with multiple entrypoints that allow for different services to run under different operational parameters. The engineering teams get to benefit from code co-location that you get from monolith. And the operations team can run the codebase as separate services that can be tweaked accordingly.

Mozilla through their experiments with web assembly is looking to running native applications in the browser. Dan Callahan’s PyCon keynote on getting Python into the browser was amazing. There is a lot of potential for web assembly, but there are a lot of unanswered questions behind it still.

I was surprised by the number of vendors who specialize in various aspects of e-commerce, who were out an exhibiting their SaaS offerings. If someone were to start a company like Points, you could do so with a smaller number of people and outsource a large number of the “non-core” elements of your business. Also Pythonistas sure love their Postgres databases, because there was quite a number of vendors working in that space too.

I got to meet and talk with the awesome Reuven Lerner, who host the amazing Freelancers’ Show. And I learned quite a bit about consulting from freelancers, and consultants who came out to Reuven’s open space. Positioning in the market is crucial, as I expected. What I didn’t expect was that I seemed to have gained quite a bit of knowledge from listening to the podcast and reading various books. Alas, it is all still theoretical rather than practical in many cases.

Python’s killer application is data science, and there is a lot of interest and work in that area. Which means while web development in Python will stay around, I believe there will be less and less emphasis on it both in the community and in PyCon. There are a lot of new and interesting coming into the field from coding schools, so only time will tell how that works out. But if you are into analysis and data science, Python will help you shine.

PyCon Canada 2018

Speaking of PyCons, Elaine Wong, who is the chair of PyCon Canada 2018, convinced me to help run the sprints for PyCon Canada 2018. This should be interesting, since I’ve never organized an event like that. But I look forward to the challenge. If you are in Toronto, and interested in helping sponsor, volunteer at or host the sprints, please contact me!