PyCon India 2011

So I attended Pycon India in Pune last week.It was really great.This was my first time in Pune and it seemed to be a pretty nice city. Met many faces after very long time and to be in a place with so many other python lovers is always a nice experience.

PyCon India this year was held at Symbiosis Vishwabhavan, Pune on 16th, 17th and 18th September 2011. PyCon India 2011 is the primary Python conference in India. A purely volunteer effort, it is being hosted for the third-time in India.

The total attendance was around 700. The conference was attended by good number of college students. It shows the popularity of Python among the college students. All the presentation slides and other details are available on PyCon India site at http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks.

I liked the talk “Functional programming with Python” by Anand C. I liked the slides he made using Landslide. Must check that out sometime.

The keynote was by Raymond Hettinger, where he described why Python is awesome. Raymond is a core contributor to Python, author of tons of awesome recipes on Active State recipes, author of the set module, itertools module and lots of other niceties. Readability and beauty, economy of expression, a strong community, integrated documentation, availability of a large number of libraries and much more. His talk highlighted what makes Python different from other languages.

The talk is available at: http://urtalk.kpoint.in/kapsule/gcc-e7c717db-f77e-43dc-9dc0-255eb47e9dd3

Then Anand Chitipothu had a talk on pyjs, which is a way to compile python code into JavaScript. The talk was good. After lunch I went to attend Sajjad’s talk on developing Android apps using Python. Track 2 was jam-packed with more people waiting outside, so the talk was moved to Track 1 which was more spacious. Noufal then took the stage with his talk on using Emacs as a Python IDE, which then got side tracked to org mode.

Below are a couple of talks which were quite impressive:

1. Functional Programming with Python, Anand Chitipothu - http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks/4
2. Twitter / Facebook / Linked-in / Google Data, Oh My! Web API programming using Python, Navin Kabra - http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks/37
3. pyjs: Compiling Python to JavaScript, Anand Chitipotu - http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks/1
4. Python on Android, Sajjad Anwar - http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks/13
5. Decorators as composable abstractions Sidhant Godiwala - http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks/43
6. Python for Data Analysis and Business Intelligence, Dhananjay Nene - http://in.pycon.org/2011/talks/63

It was a great PyCon, I learnt some interesting stuff out there. Kudos to the organizing team. I had a wonderful time at PyCon this year and would highly recommend it to anyone considering whether to go next year. And yeah, I am already looking forward for PyCon India 2012 :)