PyTexas 2023

Day 1

Keynote: Walking the Line

Amazing keynote, and I will definitely watch it again when it’s uploaded to YouTube!

• Make small, incremental, and easy to understand changes.
• Test often and fail quickly.
• Orient yourself by checking an expected failure.

A Tale of Two Typings

• Legacy code is simply code without tests types.
• Define your types, don’t just inline them.

Trust Fall: Hidden Gems in MLFlow that Improve Model Credibility

The talk focused on machine learning, but I think this can still apply outside of that.

• Build trust through documentation and reproducibility.

Exploring Socio-technical Security Concerns in Critical Open-source Python Repositories

• Catalyst: Someone intentionally introduced bad code into Linux for a research paper.
• Pull requests power open source contributions.
• FOSS needs to be careful what gets merged in.

A BuildEngineer in a buildless lang

• Improve development by reducing stylistic diffs and increasing semantic diffs.

Recursion for Beginners: A Beginner’s Guide to Recursion

• All recursive solutions have an iterative solution.
• Unless you are dealing with trees, avoid recursion.

Improving code without losing your mind

• https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/tech-debt-day/
• We tend to focus on getting features out the door.
• Like an artist, programmers should improve – refactor – their art.
• Set aside time to improve – refactor – your code.
• Make code understandable and obvious.

Lightning Talks

• Make code obvious. Otherwise, make it familiar. Otherwise, make it well-documented. Start by making it obvious!
• For demos/testing, you can pip install packages directly inside of the Python Interpreter!

>>> import pip
>>> pip.main(["install", "django"])

Day 2

Keynote: Full-Stack Python

• Python is the second best language for [doing] everything [together].
• Simple is better than complex.
• Python transforms us from programmers into problem solvers.
• Aside from HTML/CSS, the entire stack can be built with Python!
• HTMX 😍

Unlocking the Power of Health Data: An Introduction to FHIR and Python

• Healthcare coordination is a mess, with no interoperability.
• Enter the Electronic Health Record, but it had low adoption because it was only a syntactic protocol.
• Enter HL7FHIR which was syntactic, semantic, and even had an API scheme.

Having fun with application design

• Empathize – Curiosity about your users.
• Define – Understand a problem.
• Ideate – Creativity in idea generation.
• Prototype – Build the right thing.
• Test your assumptions.

How to Build and Ship More Secure Python Apps with Sigstore

• You wouldn’t pickup and chew gum (FOSS) from a wall would you? Would you!?
• Attacks on FOSS are increasing, and Sigstore hopes to fix this.
• ttl.sh, an anonymous and ephemeral Docker image registry.

HoloViz: Visualization and Interactive Dashboards in Python

• HoloViz, a framework for developing data visualization dashboards.

Put your Pants on and lint all your Python code!

• Pants, a fast, scalable, user-friendly build and developer workflow.
• Ruff, an extremely fast Python linter.

Using Python for Digital Investigations

• Digital Investigations (open-source research), research that uses info that is publicly available.
• Research sources include public geospatial, media, user-generated, and archive data.
• Open-source research and software have similar names, different histories, and both use Python as their language of choice.

Lightning Talks

• Schools, when compared to industry, focus on code instead of other import aspects like tests, documentation, and collaboration.
• Book Recommendations
  • Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook
  • A Philosophy of Software Design
  • Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving
• Single click to select by character, double click to select by word, triple click to select by line!