PyCon AU 2012

Dealing with big data isn't a particularly new problem. There are all sorts of new solutions, each with their own niche, their own hype. It's important to remember that python is not "too slow" for big data, and that with projects such as

Presentation will go in-depth on the architecture of a web application service built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, including: - developing a responsive, high-performance web application in Django - implementing

Django's test framework is excellent for ensuring that your site/app is robust, but is often neglected because of the time it can take to build and maintain a comprehensive test suite. Here we will discuss a number of tips and tricks to reduce the overheads involved.

Pytest is a mature and comprehensive testing suite for Python projects, but it can be a little intimidating for newcomers. Where do these mysterious funcargs come from, how do parametrised tests work, and where are my xUnit-style setUp and tearDown methods?

Python's ecosystem is held up to a high standard, but it falls short in a few key areas. A handful of crucial APIs are an absolute pain to work with. We'll go over where these APIs went wrong and learn about strong and elegant API desig

Behave is a tool for behaviour-driven development inspired by the Cucumber tool for Ruby. It allows developers and stakeholders to agree on how a particular piece of software should behave using an English-like Given-When- Then syntax and f

In many Python circles, Twisted is the recommended framework for all networking and multitasking applications. Twisted provides a powerful, extensible event-driven framework with built-in support for many network protocols.

The Django community is not short of ideas that could be added to the core repository. Some of these ideas are great, and are just waiting for the right implementation or the attention of a core developer. Other ideas are just not going to happen. However, it's not always obvious why an idea will be rejected. This talk will attempt explain the reasoning behind a couple of specific decisions. More broadly, this talk will aims to provide general guidance on the decision making process of the Django core. It will also address how you can get started contributing to Django.

Using gevent, pyramid and socket-io for a micro framework approach to creating real-time web apps without the braces. Why is gevent so cool and how it can let you write fast scalable apps with asynchronous IO without twisting your mind.

The PulpDist project uses SQL Alchemy as part of a custom JSON validator. This could be seen as an unusual choice, so it's worth exploring the way this approach came to be adopted. Practicing iterative development means coping with the tension between "doing the simplest thing that could possibly work" to meet immediate project requirements and avoiding "reinventing the wheel".

I have followed the development of PyPy since 2004 and played with various releases to see what the PyPy team had achieved. It wasn't until the release of PyPy 1.18 that I actually ran some existing production python code under it. The perc

Every now and then you'll find yourself with one of life's tricky situations. OK, so maybe not a literally life-threatening one. But when you remember Python is a batteries-included, script-like programming language found pretty much e

Computational Geometry is the study of geometry with the support of appropriate algorithms, and influences a broad range of fields of science, engineering and mathematics including: Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Finite Element Model

R is an incredibly powerful statistical programming language. It is the choice for powerful set and forgets analytics. However it is a specialist language without strong functionality in other areas. In areas where significant preproc

Andrew Rowe will detail and demonstrate a number of proven techniques for improving the performance of large Python programs.

It's no secret that python is fantastic when it comes to rapid prototyping and development. This talk covers continuous deployment.

Modern web applications can quickly develop many moving parts. As they grow in traffic, infrastructure, services and features, keeping track of errors and communicating about them becomes more challenging.

A highly visual (racing videos) presentation showing the TORCS racing simulator, a Python implementation of a virtual robot car, and a covering of the basic AI algorithms required to make the wheels go round. AI, math, Python an

A benchmark of a hello world application is often what developers use to make the all important decision of what web hosting infrastructure they use. Worse is that in many cases this is the only sort of performance testing or monitor

Monitoring tools will record the result of what happened to your web application or system when a problem arises, but for some classes of problem are of limited help in working out what happened, except through inference or by way of

The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) suite offers powerful tools for natural language processing and analysis. Like many other code libraries, it enables programmers to achieve results when working with data they may not be an expert

There's been a lot of buzz about "Lean Startups," "Customer Development," "Business Model Generation" and related topics lately. And there is a real transformation in the way we design and build products at work behind all that buzz.

Python can be deceptive - it looks so simple.

Head to head - popular templating engines using in the Python world will be compared and contrasted. Increasingly, frameworks allow many different choices in templating engines. In this talk I’ll discuss the different approaches, demo and pros and cons to help you decide if there is a better templating engine for you.

Do you enjoy writing test cases for your web application? If so then this may not be the talk for you. I'm going to show you how to make a single test suite perform triple testing duty, so you can get on with writing the fun stuff.

Persona is a new cross-browser login and identity system for the web that is pragmatic, federated, and serves the user.

Architecture. It's an oxymoron all by itself, and using Python is no silver bullet to the perennial problem of code rot and design complexity. How does complexity bite us in practise? What tools exist to simplify and explain arc

This is a tutorial about using Python for scientific and engineering purposes, focusing on the latest and best tools available in 2012. It will walk you through exploring a variety of interesting domains and problems using the latest