Last month, I attended the 2015 edition of the PyConES, probably the most important national Python event of the year. The talks spanned the entire weekend and there were also workshops (as the one from Django Girls) during the previous Friday.
The conference started with the keynote for Yamila Moreno (@yamila_moreno) entitled Python y Plutarco, el poder de una historia. A talk about diversity in the Python community that I recommend you to watch (hopefully the video will be online), because it is good food for thought.
I attended to a great talk of José Ignacio Galarza (@igalarzab) about How to scale a web page, based upon his experience at Ticketea. A talk full packed of good advice such as:
- Use extensive caching (even nginx caching, at the risk of eventual consistency among an autoscaling group of instances)
- Finish the rendering of your site using javascript
- Move everything not essential to background jobs, especially I/O bound tasks
- Take a closer look on your database: check your slowlog, optimise your slow o recurring queries. Manage carefully your transaction mode and your isolation level
- Use faster key-value counters (such as the ones from Redis) whenever possible, instead of a database
- Move your bottlenecks to more appropiate tools, always having a plan B
- Send your selects to read replicas
At the end of the day, the lightning talks were a blast of humorous, provocative and mind-shattering condensed talks of less than 10 minutes each. For example:
- Programación Python para Zombies, a talk from Mariano Reingart (@reingart) about a MOOC for teaching Python
- Software y Ciencia by Victor Terrón (@pyctor) about fails using Python in scientific environments (really funny!)
On Sunday, another meaty talk from Miguel Araujo (@maraujop) and Jose Ignacio Galarza, now about AsyncIO, pónganse a la cola, por favor, explaining how they used the Python 3.X library to create a VirtualLine implementation for their ticketing engine.
Alejandro Brito (@ae_bm) gave a talk entitled Funcional para trollear, covering the main functional programming libraries available in Python, in a hilarious talk.
Raúl Cumplido (@raulcumplido) spoke about Metaprogramación en Python. Very good talk, although he only managed to cover the basics of decorators and metaclasses since the time was really limited.
David Barragán (@bameda) presented Hacking the Taiga. A comprehensive talk about extending the Taiga agile project management system in many different ways (I really liked the curses client!)
Pau Freixes (@pfreixes) and Arnau Orriols (@arnau_orriols) spoke about AMQP from Python, advanced design patterns. Very interesting comparative of performance in very stressing environments of Pika, Celery librabbitmq and other libraries that implement AMQP.
Finally, Victor Terrón closed the conference with his keynote Dijsktra es mi pastor: nada me falta. Algorithms, Big O Notation, common sense and Pythonic code, with lots of humour.