PyCon 2012 is just coming to a close. There were over 2,200 people here and too many talks to choose between. It was a bloody fine conference. Meeting so many of the Names of the Python world was rather grand, teaching High Performance Computing and getting pats on the back for the creation of ShowMeDo was also rather nice.
UPDATE my notes for my High Performance Python 1 tutorial at PyCon 2012 are now online.
I Send A Big Thank You To The Organisers (and I mean all the organisers – including the AV crew who did a very fine job). This was my first US PyCon, it won’t be my last.
On the Thursday morning I ran my High Performance Python 1 tutorial for 60 students. The 3 hours passed in a blur (much as it did at EuroPython last year). I’ll have an updated booklet (here’s last year’s EuroPython booklet) in a couple of weeks. Here’s the github code.
Here’s the 3 hour video of my tutorial: High Performance Python 1 at PyCon 2012:
On Friday Paul Graham gave a nice keynote on startups (“Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas“), this rather set the stage for our attendance with StrongSteam. Keynote:
We won a booth on StartupRow on the Friday in the expo hall, I adorned our stand with some posters and props for our mobile phone demos. With StrongSteam we’re working to give a pair of eyes to mobile phones so phones can ‘see’ the world as a human does. What could you do with an API that let’s you build your own Google Goggles?
Kyran and Balthazar had put together some cool demos – OCR on photos of labels to read text and open relevant wikipedia entries and also artwork recognition for Shardcore‘s art. We won a few offers of angel investment, had an acquisition offer, got some users and found some collaborators. Not bad for the second day at the conference.
One criticism I have is that StartupRow wasn’t advertisied. We were given small booths at the back of the hall behind the big shiny stands so it looked a bit like we were the poor cousins to the ‘proper’ companies. A banner or other announcement priming folk to the idea that we were early stage would have been handy.
Today the expo hall was cleared for the poster session. This was huge, I was very happy to see a wide selection of science and HPC projects along with a handful of companies.
Now I need to sleep before the 4am wakeup for the return flight to Santiago. Then…finishing off our first StrongSteam client and moving towards inviting users into the API.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.