Blog

Some of the Six Feet Up developers attended and spoke at the PyTennessee 2015 conference. The two day event proved to be a good networking, learning, and professional experience for our team.

Aside from the beautiful venue, great food, and drinks (we never forget the beer!), we attended some great presentations and met a lot of great minds in the Python programming world. Here are a few highlights from the event:

• The most useful presentation, and one that has impacted our technique, was given by Daniel Rocco who talked about Clean and Green: Pragmatic Architecture Patterns. The talk demonstrated a technique that makes it easier to to test and maintain code post development.
• Chris Fonnesbeck's Keynote on Statistical Thinking for Data Science gave useful, real-world examples and notes for using Python for Big Data projects.
• Jenny Cheng gave a well-designed and entertaining talk about using Python to 3D Print Anything with the Blender API
• Overall, there was a unique mix of technical, specialized, and non technical topics that complimented each other and provided a good blend for the two-day event.

Six Feet Up was also invited to give two presentations. The attendance was great, and the enthusiasm even better. Here's a quick outline of each talk:

"Zen and the Art of Python"

Python highly values structure and format as a way to make code easily read by all. PEP8 is the style guide that drives this forward and The Zen of Python is a set of tenets that every Python developer should be aware of.

In this talk we reviewed several portions of PEP8 and the Zen of Python that help ensure your code is readable to other Python developers. We walked through these sections with examples that showed the benefit of following them.

Check out this talk on SlideShare for more on the basics and importance of writing beautiful code.

"How to not make a CRUD-y web app"

Views, models, and ORMs are great to quickly stand up a CRUD application. But what if you don't need any of those things? What if you want something leaner & faster to do non-CRUD things? Django is not the ideal framework for non-CRUD applications, but Pyramid, Flask, and other micro-frameworks excel at this.

This talk gave attendees an overview of how to quickly build a non-CRUD scraping and JSON consuming application with Pyramid and the benefits of doing so in a microframework.

You can view this presentation and real-life application build on Speaker Deck.

There's A lot More Where That Came From

Don't worry, if you missed PyTennessee this year, you can still catch the Sixies team at several other tech events throughout the year. Coming up, we will be at our IndyPy monthly meetups, then we'll head to PyCon, and gear up for our next Pythology Lecture Series featuring Data Science with Python. We'll be seeing you soon!