Geek goes to PyCon PL 2012 - day 1

Last week, I went to my first programming conference ever - PyCon PL 2012!

Here's what I wore on the first day:

I fooled a few people that I worked at Google, which wasn't my intention, but this misunderstanding was promptly explained.

Day one was mainly the trip there and being too tired afterwards to party like it's PyCon 2012. Still, the lectures were rich in content and very interesting.

Łukasz Langa talked about Ralph, an asset management system for your data centers. Written in-house to manage the biggest cloud in Poland, it is now open-source. Łukasz talked about how Ralph was born: out of need, when adding new admins wasn't helping to keep the huge and varied infrastructure in order. The beginnings were tough, as there was only one developer and no process like scrum was in place. This one developer wanted to do everything for everyone, which of course couldn't work well. The solutions for this situation were:

1. more devs
2. applying scrum by the book (I never knew that in the real scrum, a task from outside the sprint cancels the entire sprint!)
3. git workflow
4. one good changelog
5. one good backlog
6. thematical sprints.

 The second talk was by PyCon PL's youngest speaker ever, 18-year-old Marek Šuppa. He talked about programming Lego NXT robots with Python and how he taught it to kids. He created his own IDE, nxtIDE, complete with a simulator, for that purpose. The show was the best part:

 The third talk was by lvh, about fractal architectures. Big data is big these days and everyobody is scaling up - but why not scale down first? Why not, for example, shard your data by user and for every user, set up a separate SQLite database? Once you've scaled down this much, scaling up is easy. Well, except when it's not. Some problems arise, like wide queries for statistics, global, non-user-specific data, handling transactions... Depending on your project, these issues might be bigger or smaller and a fractal architecture can be a good solution for you or not. It's not a silver bullet, but definitely an interesting concept.

The last talk on that day was about forms in Python, their challenges and existing solutions. Szymon Pyżalski presented them, along with a framework of his own: Anthrax. (See his page for PyCon materials and more on Anthrax.) Szymon works for STX Next, the daughter company of my previous employer. Having dealt a lot with forms at that job, I knew exactly what Szymon was talking about. :) Since my current job is so different, however, (I basically have one big form!), I wasn't very interested in the details and didn't take many notes.

After the talks, I had a few drinks with STX Next people, then went to sleep.

To be continued...

Blogging my thesis: 2nd of October

On Saturdays, I usually get to stay home all day, except for a belly dance class and maybe a walk with my husband. What a great time to check mail, apply for Google Wave invites, chech mail, check Facebook, expand my musical horizons, check mail, check Facebook work on my thesis.

What have I done today? My answer is a typical one for a student asked by his advisor what he's done so far:

Er, I have found, I have read, I have understood...

I think I've finally understood the previously mentionned Bernstein method. Understanding is the toughest part (unless you were a sissie wise person and chose an easy subject) - then comes description and implementation. Actually, doing these while trying to understand works really good, I always do that. I now have half a dozen of lines of LaTeX erroneously deleted and product trees implemented in 8 impressive lines of code (n = len(primes), if n == 1: return primes and stuff like that). But all of these were proudly accomplished yesterday, and today, I just read and understood.

Well, the night is still young.

Google Wave: will curiosity kill the geek?

I signed up for Google Wave! Now I have to hope I'm one of the 100,000 chosen ones and wait for October and then I might try it out.


What is Google Wave anyway? No one exactly knows, but Gina Trapani said in less that 140 characters:

Simplest terms: Google Wave is Gmail on crack. Imagine Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Docs in one big inbox.

Sounds cool. I'd love to try that! Especially if I get to give improvement suggestions when it comes to usability.

More info on Google Wave here and here.

Google is totally censored (and I don't mean Google China)

Google is totally censored - and I don't mean Google China. This screenshot from the original google.com proves it all:


Notice anything missing? Let me just say it gives 17,600,000 results, so it definitely belongs on the list.

What [not] to watch: Memento vs. A Beautiful Mind

Wow, "A Beautiful Mind" wins on Google Fight! I'm very surprised as it's an English title, but maybe Google Fight is limited to sites in English? Anyway, that's not my point. My point is that the Geek Chick loves both movies, however, not equally.
"A Beautiful Mind" is a really wonderful movie about how a mathematician and his wife deal with his schizophrenia. It's true (both based on facts and realistic) and constructive, he really deals with the illness and achieves a lot.
And old friend (a mathematician, those really dominate among my friends, I wonder why) recommended me "Memento" and I got to see it on New Year's Eve. I was expecting another Beautiful Mind about amnesia and I learned a lesson about reading some reviews before assuming anything about a movie because seen that way, it was quite disappointing. It's a good, original, kinda make-you-think-about-life movie, but relating it to reality doesn't really work and the amnesia in the movie isn't 100% realistic.
The best thing about both movies is that they really put you in the shoes of the protagonist. You get to see how it feels to see things that don't exist or to forget everything. The tensions isn't bad either. The acting is excellent. The rating on Rotten Tomato (because my taste in movies is still really immature) is impressing.
Any film producer run out of ideas on board? I'd really love to see a mix of the two: a movie as realistic and educative as the first one and about amnesia like the second one.