Nick Jackson and I attended Pycon UK 2012 in Coventry over the weekend of 28th – 30th September. The aim was to get to grips and obtain an understanding of the Python programming language.
The main reason we went was because CKAN was written in python and, as we will be extending it, it makes sense to understand the tools we will be using before we dive in and start to mess about without knowing what we are doing.
There were a number of talks given about how Python is currently being used, the future of the language as well as open spaces to network. I had gone along to a number of these talks, such as Raspberry Pi and Python, Python in a teaching environment and Python powered rich apps. Unfortunately, I missed the talk on practical Artificial Intelligence with Python as I was attending the beginners Python workshop. In a way, this probably proved more useful as I now have a better understanding of the language and its differences. These differences, for example, include how boolean values are case sensitive and the interesting way references work. Any small bit of syntax will be useful later on when programming.
Without expanding on how the programming language operates, I can say that it has been a very easy language to understand, and has been referenced as ‘Executable pseudo code’. Meaning that it basically does what it says on the tin. It is very human readable.
Networking also helped, as we met someone from the MET Office who was very interested in how we were managing research data, as they themselves were having to manage a lot of data. We may have inadvertently sold CKAN to them. We also met, and spoke with, Ross who works on CKAN. After speaking to both, we gained an understanding of what CKAN is like to develop on and how data is managed elsewhere in large quantities.
The Python community proved to be a valuable asset to the Orbital project, thanks to their friendliness towards newcomers to the language and helpfulness with learning it. A lot of speakers also happened to be ex-teachers, which may have helped. I foresee a useful set of connections with this community in the future.