PyCon Australia 2018
I attended PyCon Australia 2018 with a colleague Aapeli and a bunch of industry friends.
We learned a bunch of important new things about the state of the Python ecosystem in 2018. I also picked up a few cool tips and tricks and heard about new libraries.
A few things of note from the conference:
- A great way to help beginners understand how Python, and programming more broadly, works is to run them through the code in the way in which the interpreter does in a step-by-step manner. There was a good talk called "Running Python on your brain computer" that talked about how many issue with programming come from assuming the computer is doing things things in ways that it isn't. Python Tutor is really good tool for helping people understand the flow of execution of python programs.
- Asyncio support for Django is getting better, also see the ASGI library
- More people are using Python as their scripting language of choice.
- More people from outside the software industry are using Python and the huge growth of Python adoption has led to a shortage of senior Python developers and consultants.
I notice that people are less concerned about performance than they used to be, the availability of powerful server instances has changed the economics of performance engineering somewhat. This has led to fewer people being exposed to the need to learn tools like the python C-API or CFFI or similar.
Also Caleb Hattingh gave me a copy of the book he authored called "20 Python libraries you aren't using (but should)" which I'd highly recommend for people who are newer to Python. Thanks Caleb for the book!