Speaking At PyCon Canada 2019 – Rust Accelerated Pythons

I am happy to announce that I will be giving a talk on Rust and Python at PyCon Canada 2019: Rust Accelerated Pythons!


I will be talking about how to write Python bindings for Rust. With Rust you can create and call fast native code without worrying about having to use C/C++. And creating Python bindings is pretty easy in Rust. This talk will give an introduction to the Rust language, the challenges of writing cross-language bindings, and an example of working with the excellent PyO3 library. Hope to see you there if you are in the Toronto area for PyCon Canada!

If you can’t make it out to PyCon Canada this year, I also plan on giving this talk at an upcoming Rust Toronto meetup. More details will on that in a future post.

PyCon CA 2016 – The Art of Writing Wargames in Python with Kivy

Intro

Last year in November, I presented a talk about Kivy at PyCon Canada 2016. I talked about my experiences working with Kivy in the context of writing a strategy game. I discussed the various UI frameworks available to a Python developer, and why Kivy is currently the best choices for UIs in Python. Especially if you are interested in making a cross-platform app or game.

Video

Links

Abstract

Many of us got our start in programming, by building games and simple apps. However creating interesting games and UIs in Python was not a simple task especially for multiple platforms. Kivy, a cross-platform Python UI app framework changes all that. This talk discusses the journey of working with Kivy to develop a moderately complex strategy game. It also contrasts to using other platforms

Reaction

Overall, the talk went better than I expected. The audience was engaged and interested. There was a few technical difficulties, namely I had to resort to using my phone as a wifi hotspot to run my presentation rather than Ryerson University’s wifi. Also there was a noticeable delay between when I changed slides on my presentation notes, and the projected display. This kind of delay is probably the only downside of using slides.com this time around. Having a local copy would of worked better, which I will do so in the future.

Also I wish I had more time to come up with a better demo for the presentation. However even after the sprints, the hex grid layout still plagues my Kivy app. In hindsight, I probably should of worked on a simpler app. Also some folks were turned off by the use of wargames, rather general games. But you know, you learn from your mistakes.

Finally I got quite a few questions, and people are genuinely interested in checking out Kivy. Which ultimately was what I was trying to achieve with this talk.

Giving a Talk at PyCon Canada 2015

I am super excited to announce that I will be doing a talk at PyCon Canada this year! I will be talking about migrating from using Fabric to deploy my WSGI app (Rookeries) to using a combination of Invoke and Ansible. PyCon Canada will be happening in Toronto at the University of Toronto campus Saturday November 7 to Sunday November 8, 2015. My talk will on the Sunday at 3:45-4:15 PM. Videos of the talks should be available about a day or two after the talk. I look forward to seeing everyone there!

More info on my talk.

Also I plan on being at the Sprints the following Monday as well.