Python

Above: A view of the busy exhibit hall. Photo copyright © 2019 by Sean Harrison. All rights reserved.

PyCon 2019 attracted 3,393 attendees, including a group of six Cakti. When we weren’t networking with attendees at our booth, we attended some fascinating presentations. Below are some of our favorites. You can watch these talks and more on the PyCon 2019 YouTube channel.

Pictured: I traveled to Cleveland, OH, for PyCon 2019, where I got this shot of the city skyline.

This year I attended PyCon for the first time. It’s rather amazing that I haven’t been before, since I’ve been using Python professionally for over 15 years. PyCon 2019 was held in Cleveland from May 1–9. There was so much to take in, and there are so many good things to say about it. It was a fantastic experience. But rather than provide a “mission report: 2019” a la Winter Soldier, I thought I’d do something more useful — write a guide to PyCon from a newbie perspective. Here are six lessons I learned from my first PyCon.

Pictured: The final rush is on! Staff quickly check materials for our PyCon booth.

PyCon 2019 is almost here, and we’re excited to continue to sponsor this premier Python event, which takes place in Cleveland, OH, from May 1 - 9. PyCon attracts attendees from around the world, and for the first time, the conference will include a track of Spanish talks.

In this post, I review some reasons why it's really difficult to program correctly when using times, dates, time zones, and daylight saving time, and then I'll give some advice for working with them in Python and Django. Also, I'll go over why I hate daylight saving time (DST).

In 2018, we published 44 posts on our blog, including technical how-to’s, a series on UX research methods, web development best practices, and tips for project management. Among all those posts, 18 rose to the top of the popularity list in 2018.

You may look at my job title (or picture) and think, “Oh, this is easy, he’s going to resolve to stand up at his desk more.” Well, you’re not wrong, that is one of my resolutions, but I have an even more important one. I, Jeremy Gibson, resolve to do less work in 2019. You’re probably thinking that it’s bold to admit this on my employer’s blog. Again, you’re not wrong, but I think I can convince them that the less work I do, the more clear and functional my code will become. My resolution has three components.

Sometimes we inherit code that doesn't follow the style guidelines we prefer when we're writing new code. We could just run flake8 on the whole codebase and fix everything before we continue, but that's not necessarily the best use of our time.

I recently looked into whether I could use pip-tools to improve my workflow around projects' Python dependencies. My conclusion was that pip-tools would help on some projects, but it wouldn't do everything I wanted, and I couldn't use it everywhere. (I tried pip-tools version 2.0.2 in August 2018. If there are newer versions, they might fix some of the things I ran into when trying pip-tools.)

This is the second post in the 2018 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, which highlights the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.

Welcome to the 2018 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.