My Top 7 Picks on PyCon 2020 Online

#datascience #beginners #python #webdev

Introduction

Now there is a lot of technology conferences going online. Which is boon for anyone unable to attend it? Especially I wish to have a chance to go to PyCon US someday. To have a chat with a bunch of Python developers in the US and across the world.

Recently while I was listening on one of the podcast episodes on Talk Python to Me - Why Python is Slow?. That PyCon 2020 has happened with video recordings will be posted online on their Youtube Channel. I started to look for videos that are interesting to me. Which I believe will be useful for you. So here it goes!!!

Data Science

Docker and Python: making them play nicely and securely for Data Science and ML - Tania Allard

It provides you with a sandbox environment. To deploy your data science projects. With a specific server environment or edge computer. That can be totally different from your development environment. This is why I feel it is useful for anyone. Who is deploying into edge computers or a server?

Beautiful Python Refactoring - Conor Hoekstra

I would watch it to learn to refactor a piece of code. Which is quite interesting that I did not think of when refactoring code. The video provides insights that are useful to know when refactoring a piece of code.

Deploying Python at Scale with Dask - Matthew Rocklin

The talks are by the creator of Dask that talks in details. On the problem, it is trying to solve for Data Science work. Which is used by ScikitLearn, Rapids, XGBoost. The project is also supported by Darpa, Nvidia, Anaconda.

For anyone who is looking in deploying or testing their data science project on distributed hardware. This could be used to reduce your costs & focus on security to run it on the cloud or having a bunch of hardware cluster for data science. Which feels like you are running it from your laptop.

Python

Modern Python Developer's Toolkit - Sebastian Witowski

The talk provides you with a good starting point for anyone who is looking to use various developer tools to help you to get started with for Python. Which from most tutorial or articles I come across, they might skip it. Due to making it easier for anyone to use it by drilling into the problems, it is trying to solve it.

It uses the VS Code for the video. Unless your planning to use an IDE. Like Pycharm to help you in it without learning too many tools.

Why Python Is Slow? - Anthony Shaw

I'm sure you had come across articles that talk about comparing the speed of Python vs X programming language for development. Usually, I tend to skip this as most of them provide a very superficial level. Which is why it makes sense for me to watch this video.

As he talks in-depth with various compilers for Python and comparisons with different other programming languages. To explain why Python is slow and picking the right Python compilers to get the job done or what is the advantage of Python can be used for development.

Hands-On Web App Test Automation - Andrew Knight

If you work in Flask or Django or Web development, you definitely will be finding ways to test your API, UI, user interactions, database calls.

I would suggest to watch it. If you want to have a general introduction on testing which provides you with a rough understanding of testing before diving deeper into TDD.

Education Summit 2020

Education places a huge role for me as an ex STEM educator before working professionally as a developer. I believe supporting educators is really important to introduce Python or part of computer science & data science programs, especially for younger kids.

Which this is a trend I'm seeing among educators in my country. For other education systems in various countries as well. Instead of just using C or Java as part of your introduction to computer science education. Which can be really daunting for anyone to start with kids who want to build robots, drones and games like Minecraft.

Conclusion

I hope it will be useful for you who are looking at watching the videos of PyCon 2020. This is my own personal preference and picks that I find will be useful for Educators, Data Scientist and Python developers. Who is looking to upgrade their skills or knowledge to become better with Python?

Lastly, I wish I could have the opportunity in the future to attend PyCon US. Once the travel restrictions have been lifted for my country. In the meantime, I could just spend some of my weekends watching and testing out the talks or tutorials in PyCon 2020. Do leave a comment on your favourite videos for PyCon 2020 if it did not make it into my list. I would love to watch it.