Experience Unfolded: PyCon India 2019
October 12th, 13th at Chennai Trade Centre, India
PyCon India is an international conference for python enthusiasts round the nation to unite, share knowledge and cherish memorable experiences.
This is my second PyCon experience — the first one was quite special indeed! If interested, you can read a tiny section about it over here.
Here, I will take you through my full journey — from departure till return. I hope you find some notable takeaways from this write up.
We departed after college class at 4.45 PM on 11th October. We = Varun, Emanuel, Ameen, Jithin, Kurian and myself. Adithya decided to come by bus. Some other friends of mine (connections made via local community events) were also heading for pycon so the excitement was quite real!
We thankfully did not miss the train. Onward journey we had several fun experiences such as deep discussions (about anything and everything), pizza eat out via Domino Pizza delivery (using our PNR code!) and fun evening game time with Sreeram and gang from MACE. Also from Palakkad, Varun’s mother provided us with sandwich for dinner (Thank you Aunty!)
We reached Chennai next day morning at 7.30 AM. We stopped by at my mom’s place to drop our luggage, before taking another Uber to the venue. We thankfully made it well in time over there — registration desks were arranged in numbered order so it was well organized.
After breakfast began the first keynote session by Jake VanderPlas where he explained how he started from astro-physics and finally ended up at Software engineering via data science. His primary argument was that Python was not a data science language. To justify, he went on to explain three distinct phases:
- Scripting Era (1990's): Python served as the common glue between different interfaces (related: SWIG)
- SciPy Era (2000's): Scientific processing started to be in demand and so the corresponding developments took place. The notable creations include matplotlib (to visualize), scipy (for computation), iPython (shell).
- PyData Era (2010's): Data analysis required easier ways to quickly reach to results and Python made it possible thanks to its simplicity (when compared to its alternatives).
To get started in the data science world using Python, Jake recommended the following:
- Basic Interface (Miniconda)
- Coding environment (Jupyter + Binder)
- Numerical Computation (Numpy)
- Visualization (Matplotlib/plotly/altair/seaborne)
- Dashboarding (Panel)
- Numerical Algorithms (SciPy)
- Machine Learning (SciKitLearn)
- Parallel Computation (DASK)
- Code Optimization (Numba/Cython {Python →LLVM})
- Other resources (Check out PyViz.org)
He concluded by saying that Python is a swiss-army knife with several utilities — each being an additional library or module for us to benefit from. Really insightful talk.
After the short tea-break, the parallel sessions commenced and I certainly was excited for it.
Talk #1: Practical introduction to Graph DBs, Graph Traversals in Python
by Srimathi H
This was the same technology I spent my summer time working on as part of my internship project and I had a couple of doubts on my mind that I wanted to clear so was delighted to sit for this. As you might realize from the presentation deck, she started out by explaining what are network graphs, why graph databases can be advantageous in certain use cases and how it simplifies queries that we search for.
After the talk, I spent some time explaining my problem pertaining to the domain she spoke about and she offered her support via e-mail updates in the future. I am grateful for her will to help.
I skipped the next session to explore the stalls that were available all around. Several notable organizations such as Thoughtworks, JetBrains, Microsoft had their stalls where they explained their latest product, a challenge to complete to win free swags and scope to work in their company. These challenges were good because it encouraged students to learn new concepts from the internet to fill in the crossword or complete the quiz. I entered another talk session that interested me as it was related to an ongoing project of mine.
Talk #2: Exploring Augmented Reality with Python
by Srikar Mutnuri
The slides should be self explanatory. What interested me mainly was his views about depth estimation in images and so I inquired about the same after the talk. Also, I wanted to hear his thoughts about our teams idea to create Augmented Reality menu cards for restaurants. It seems I will have to keep exploring to see what alternatives like 6d.ai has to offer. Thank you for the pointers Srikar!
Another talk by this speaker:
Following this talk was the much awaited lunch with an array of exquisite dishes. After the lunch, I spent time finding a plug point to charge my phone and met Sonam — a speaker for the day. I learned that she is working in the Entrepreneurship cell of IIT Madras research park.
We connected online and I hope she enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. I unfortunately missed her talk as I was exploring the poster presentations later that evening.
I skipped the talks as I was feeling a bit low. For some reason, PyCon did not quite meet my expectation at this point. I imagined myself meeting several tweeps and being approached by other tweeps I met online (may be a little narcisism from my end, I agree) but there were too many people and not many people were trying to go beyond their peer group to meet new people. Also folks who I wanted to meet did not seem approachable — I quickly started feeling inferior and struggled to socialize. I did talk to a few who seemed equally perplexed by the number of participants and seemed lost.
Thankfully Ameen, the junior from college, came to my aid and helped me overcome to slump by going together to a few stalls. Now I did not want to go to the stalls either cause too many were already competing and I tend to be bad when in a competitive environment. I knew the journey of attempting and learning stuff mattered more than whether or not I won the swags but the fear of failure (even for this petty reason) caught the better part of me. Ameen helped me out and I was able to win a coffee mug from the Ericson counter for explaining under which conditions does a model that uses random forest tend to underfit. This helped me restore my self-esteem and I started liking the conference again.
An interesting talk that I missed while exploring the sponsor booths.
In the evening, attending keynote session by Ms. Devi about participation of women in technology.
Returned home after planning and failing to go to the beach due to clashing objectives. Sreeram and Shibija joined us as their accommodation pan did not quite well work out. Jesvin Chetan from Kochi Python also came for dinner (so did Adithya) and we had a fun time. That night, there were 9 of us staying at my Mom’s place and it certainly was memorable for me.
Mom left for church in the morning while the rest of us slowly made our way to the conference. We missed the keynote session by Ines Montani.
I don’t distinctly remember any talks from that day. My lightning talk proposal was rejected but Subin’s was accepted for his SelfieADay project (really cool work!). If you wish to see any talk in more detail/presentation deck/references, click on the relevant hyperlinks in the schedule .
All Keralites united together and had a quick introduction.
Kurian, my classmate, gave his talk session as the last one in Hall C. It went really well and I am glad for him. I hope he succeeds well in the years to come and adds more value to the world through his actions.
David Beazley delivered the last talk with a live coding demonstration (that I honestly did not quite well understand) but looked really cool. He received a standing ovation at the end of 60 minutes for creating something significant from scratch.
Kurian and I left via Uber for our 7 PM train along with Kokul. The rest from our batch stayed for the DevSprint. I heard that went well as well.
Overall, I realized I am far from proficiency but it is not too late to start. Look forward to the next PyCon India in 2020. Hopefully I too will have inputs to share when the time is ripe.
