PyCon Tutorials, day 1, Liveblog

I’ll update this as the day progresses at PyCon 2010.

—————

1623: We’re done. This tutorial was at a more beginner level than I had expected. It was probably just right for some, maybe even a majority, of the audience. But some topics (e.g., the “base” template and settings files, how to change your site’s logo) were given too much time. Now, I have to figure out my dinner plans.

1606: Pinax’s deployment support is nice. Here we go. It auto-generates some configuration files that are definite time-savers.

1538: For Section 508 compliance, there’s django-uni-form. Included in Pinax. But I can just download it myself… django-ajax-validation, django-pagination… Hrm.

1514: And Pinax includes django-groups. But, again, I can just download django-groups into my Django project. Hrm.

1450: Wow, to add a CSS file, you add a link tag to site_base.html? Hrm.

1437: Been talking about installing other Django apps, why you shouldn’t modify core Pinax apps, etc. Hrm.

1415: I’m being a bit of a curmudgeon here, but so far Pinax’s base feature set isn’t an improvement over just using django-registration. I’m hoping the talk goes deeper into Pinax applications.

1325: Had a decent lunch in the hotel. Now in “A Long Pinax Tutorial.”

1152: Threads and processes.

1135: Psyco. This is so easy to use, I should use it more often.

1107: Moving on to caching. Eh, manual function caching may sometimes be a win, but it’s a little ugly.

1015: Gotta use Python sets more often. They can have much higher performance than lists in the right setting. Sets have been my least-used data type in Python…I’ve been in a data type comfort zone. Use appends instead of inserts on lists.

0958: Reviewing optimization basics. String concatenation bad. List and Generator Comprehensions. Dictionaries and Sets preferable to Lists. Etc. He’s spending a lot of time on immutable strings. Mike made excellent point about Comprehensions being far more suitable than loops are for future parallelism. “Loop-less programming” FTW.

0945: This talk is excellent. Learning about profiling Python memory, using Guppy-PE.

0918: My MacBook Pro is 70K Pystones.

0907: The wireless network is reliably up! Awesome! Sitting in “Faster Python Programs through Optimization”.