Pycon 2021

July 17, 2021

I was fortunate enough to be able to virtually attend Pycon this year. It has been a long time since I have attended a technical conference not related to Android and I really enjoyed it. These are some of the highlights I took away from it.

Keynote by Robert Erdmann from the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam. Robert detailed an amazing project called Operation Night Watch. The museum is making macro images of the 14 ft by 12 ft Night Watch painting by Rembrandt. The idea is to be able to view the detail of the painting at an ultra high resolution (700+ gigapixels, resolution of 5 microns). I won't go into all of the details, but there are several technical hurdles they had to overcome to make the project happen. The museum has some technical details and there is a lower resolution version of the image you can play with. I highly recommend watching the keynote.

Writing Good Developer Docs by Meredydd Luff. The talk covered a bit about using Jupyter notebooks for documentation which was why I originally attended. However there were some excellent points about documentation.

Unexpected Execution: Wild Ways Code Execution can Occur in Python by Graham Bleaney and Ibrahim Mohamed. They talked about their work at Facebook developing an open source static analysis tool for Python, Pysa. They went through several real world examples covering deserialization, input, string formatting among others. Being a former Java developer, I have used static analysis in the past and found it useful. I will be checking out Pysa and doing some further studying of their examples.

These are just a few of the talks I enjoyed. The Pycon session videos are now available and I highly recommend checking them out.