The second day of PyCon Australia is just wrapping up. Below are my notes from the talks I attended.

Tennessee Leeuwenberg’s keynote

• transparency is needed to build managers’ and customers’ trust in our development work
• IPython Notebook is a tool to be more transparent, by demonstrating code in action and producing visualisations [if your customers/stakeholders are scientists?]

Chris and Sandra Boesch: making Python fun

• SingPath is an interactive programming tutorial system
• badges, competition, and back-story help make it more fun and increase motivation
• in a single class, some students will struggle to keep up and others will find it too easy
• selectable difficulty helps with that
• tournaments: the class competes with each other, advanced students finish first and then help others
• working on pair programming tournaments

Kenneth Reitz: open source

• “public source”: no serious attempt at building a community, just throwing some code over the fence with an open source license
• Gittip is the polar opposite: “open source company”, extreme transparency
• requests is a “dictatorship project” with only one decision-maker
• contributors and maintainers need to be cordial and respectful of each other
• maintainers need to ignore non-constructive feedback, and encourage useful contributions
• saying “no” to feature bloat is difficult but necessary
• simple good, complex bad

David Kent: water forecasting

• WAFARi is an internal BOM tool to forecast monthly water stream flow, written in Python
• code exposed in IPython to make it easy for scientists to explore and examine the data
• matplotlib for many different visualisations
• water modelling code is written in FORTRAN and R, calling into it from Python is easy
• Hydrological Reference Stations service provides historical data about water stream flow
• pandas makes it easy to work with time series data

Dylan Lacey: web testing

• acceptance testing (testing from the user’s point of view) is important
• Splinter is a Python library abstracting browser automation tools
• don’t use CSS selectors or XPath for finding elements [this seems like an unhelpful over-simplification]
• don’t use negative assertions because of the wait delay

Luke Miller’s big gay adventure

• pyvida makes it simple to write point-and-click adventure games

Adam Forsyth: Stack Overflow

• contributing to Stack Overflow is like working on open-source software
• the tag pages use WebSockets to update new questions live
• contributing can help you learn to answer questions better and communicate better in real life