Friday, March 27th through Sunday, March 29th were the “core” conference days. These are the days with regular scheduled talks, keynote talks, lightning talks and open spaces. You can see an overview of the schedule for these three days at http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/.
I’ll present my notes from PyCon in chronological order.Last year there were lightning talk sessions after the scheduled talks on all three days. Perhaps the scheduling committee got plenty of “more lightning talks” feedback, because this year each day also started with lightning talks, so except for a brief introduction from the PyCon 2009 Chair David Googer on Friday morning, the conference kicked off with lightning talks. I found this quite fitting and in keeping with PyCon being a community conference.
Morning Lightning Talks
You’ll find the video at http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/2/.- Brett Cannon (~3:45 in the video) presented on python.org’s switching to a DVCS (from Subversion). See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/, particularly http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#chosen-dvcs which makes the decision to go with Mercurial official.
- Jonathan Ellis (about 12:30 in the video) spoke about the Cassandra distributed database), opened sourced by Facebook in the summer of 2008. He made it sound like it’s the only (open source?) “distributed database” with a Python API.
Jeff Rush - About Python Namespaces (and Code Objects)
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/7/ for the video, slides and other files.I didn’t know compiling and disassembling Python code is as simple as:
s = 'x = 5'
co = compile(s, '<stdin>', 'exec')
from dis import dis
dis(co)
His “thunk” example—which he defines as “like a proxy but it gets out of the way when you need it”—is interesting. See page 38 of the PDF or about 11:30 of the video.
I also noted that he said “we spend a lot of time going over source code in Dallas [at the Dallas Python Interest Group]”. That would be a worthwhile thing to try at BayPIGgies—I’ll propose it [TODO].
Adam D Christian - Using Windmill
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/9/ for the video and PowerPoint slides.“Windmill is the best-integrated solution for Web test development and its flexibility is largely due to its development in Python.”
- Open source
- Looks pretty slick
- http://www.getwindmill.com
- Selenium does SSL, Windmill doesn’t…yet.
- Selenium has strong Java integration (and Windmill does not)
Question: “Why did you create Windmill?”
Answer: “At the time it took us longer to debug a Selenium test than to write it over again.”
Mike Fletcher - Introduction to Python Profiling
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/15/ for the video and slides in OOo & PDF formats.Asked 12 programmers “If I had a million dollars to spend on Python…”. The top three answers were about improving performance.
Good introduction. You may want to check out the slides first and then turn to the video for more detail.
- Visualization Tools:
- KCacheGrind - “some assembly required for use with Python”[and non-trivial to get it working on Mac OS X]
- RunSnakeRun: (http://www.vrplumber.com/programming/runsnakerun/) - “doesn’t provide all the bells-and-whistles of a program like KCacheGrind, it’s intended to allow for profiling your Python programs, and just your Python programs”
Kumar McMillan - Strategies For Testing Ajax Web Applications
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/18/ for the video and a ZIP containing the slides in HTML (or go to http://farmdev.com/talks/test-ajax/).
5 strategies:
- Test Data Handlers
- Test JavaScript
- Isolate UI for Testing
- Automate UI Tests
- Gridify Your Test Suite
Aaron Maxwell - Building an Automated QA Infrastructure using Open-Source Python Tools
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/22/ for the video and the slides (in OOo & PPT formats). Or see http://redsymbol.net/talks/auto-qa-python/:“This demonstrates the value of an automated QA system. If you need to manually execute the code coverage tool, then in practice you just won’t do it as often as if it is run for you. If your QA system automatically runs code coverage each night (for example), you and your team are freed up from bothering to do it manually - or even remembering to do so. It’s just done silently, and a fresh coverage report is available when you are ready to see it.
“This talk referenced the The Buildbot QA/CI Framework. There are many such frameworks with different plusses and minuses. BuildBot’s weakness is its brief but steep learning curve, which makes it harder than anyone would like to set up for simple projects. Its plusses are its generality, range, and extensibility: it can be made to do almost anything you need your QA system to do, even for tremendously large projects with complex test metrics. Overall, I recommend BuildBot be used for building your QA framework, unless you have some particular reason to use one of the others that are out there.”
From slide 5: “Your QA System is ONLY as good as its reporting of results. If you don’t get this done well… none of the rest matters. Under appreciated…And critically, critically important.”
From slide 9: “BuildBot is probably the best general purpose Python-based, open-source framework available now.”
Slide 11 gives quick definitions of some BuildBot architectural terms.
Slides 12-19 walk through examples of a simple and a more complex BuildBot configuration.
Slides 20 & 21 show examples of extending BuildBot.Owen Taylor - Reinteract: a better way to interact with Python
I didn’t attend this talk, but several people remarked on it later. I’ve since played with Reinteract and I recommend you check it out: http://www.reinteract.org/.See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/23/ for the video and the slides (in PDF format). The slides are not at all useful by themselves. But I definitely recommend you watch the video. Reinteract could well be a tool you’ll want to use regularly.
“Traditionally Python has worked one of two ways: either a program with an edit-run cycle or a command prompt where the user types commands. Reinteract introduces a new way of working where the user creates a worksheet that interleaves Python code with the results of that code. Previously entered code can be changed and corrected. The ability to insert graphs and plots in the worksheet makes Reinteract very suitable for data analysis, but it also is a good for basic experimentation with the Python language. This talk introduces Reinteract and gives a high-level peek at the magic behind the scenes.”
Ned Batchelder - Coverage testing, the good and the bad.
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/26/ for the video and the slides (in PDF format).“Coverage testing tests your tests”
The slides are easy to read without the video if you prefer, so I won’t duplicate them here.
Writing more tests is the “only way to truly increase code coverage”. Excluding code to boost coverage is tempting, but you’ll never come back, so you’re only hurting yourself.What is currently “100% broken”:
- branch coverage
- path coverage
- loop path coverage
- data-driven code - can’t measure data used
- complex conditionals
- hidden branches
- broken tests
Dr. C. Titus Brown - Building tests for large, untested codebases
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/30/ for the video and the slides (in PDF format).Presented on his experiences creating tests for pygr, a Python graph database (for use in bioinformatics). (slide 11)
- ~8K of Python, ~2K of Pyrex (-> C, for speed)
- almost all library and framework (complex)
- lots of technical debt
- new tests efforts on legacy code
- understanding code bases
- start with minimum useful statement
- examine code that’s actually executed
- add additional statement
- examine executed code
- repeat
Coverage driven testing (slide 29)
- each new test should “attack” an uncovered line of code
- immediate gratification of new code coverage
- finds simple bugs with ease
- you now understand that code
Jesse Noller - Introduction to Multiprocessing in Python
I didn’t attend this (as it was at the same time as the above talk), but I heard it was good. See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/31/ for the video and the slides (in PDF format).Michael Foord - Functional Testing of Desktop Applications
See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/34/ for the video. See http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/testing/index.shtml for “online slides”.If you write applications without tests then you are a bad person, incapable of love. — Wilson Bilkovich (The Rails Way)
Why Test Functionally? (http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/testing/processes.shtml)
- Unit tests test components - not the application as a whole
- Check new features don’t break existing functionality
- Massively helpful when refactoring
- Individual tests act as specification for a feature
- Test suites are a specification for the application
- When the test passes you know the feature is done
- They can drive development
Good advice in dealing with problems (http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/testing/problems.shtml)
Fragility due to layout changes- Timing problems (beware the lure of the voodoo sleep)
- Some UI elements are very hard to test
- System dialogs (that are hard to interact with programmatically)
- How do you test printing?
- Bugs in the GUI toolkit
- Spurious, random and impossible failures
Raymond Hettinger - Easy AI with Python
I didn’t attend this (as it was at the same time as the above talk), but I heard it was good. See http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/71/ for the video and slides (in PPT & PDF formats).Evening Lightning Talks
You’ll find the video at http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/39/.RANT: “import *” is evil (right at 0:05 in the video)
some call Brazil “Belindia” because it’s like “islands of Belgium in a sea of India” (6:18)
Michael Foord - Metaclasses in Five Minutes (12:00)
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/five-minutes.shtml
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