Six Feet Up at PyCon 2022: Bootstrapping Computers

Six Feet Up CTO and AWS Community Hero, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, spoke at PyCon 2022, which was held in-person for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The in-person event was held from April 27 to May 3. During the conference, Sixies — including Calvin, Adam Atkison (VP of Engineering) and Glenn Franxman (Senior Python Developer) — were hanging out in the JetBrains booth where attendees could pick up cool stickers (see below) and get bootstrapping tips from Calvin.

PyCon 2022 also featured a number of Lightning Talks and fun activities. For example, Mario Munoz, one of the Lightning Talk presenters and author of the Python By Night blog, played a game of Exploding Kittens (using an exclusive expansion pack, Exploding Pythons, provided by Six Feet Up) with Calvin and others. Mario’s game with Calvin and other PyCon experiences are detailed here.

Calvin Talks Bootstrapping

Calvin’s half-hour talk, “Bootstrapping your Local Python Environment,” delves into tools and techniques that will help developers of all levels:

• install Python,
• efficiently manage multiple virtual environments, and
• reduce the complexity of developing across versions with a development computer.

“This is not as simple as it may seem, as you probably found out from the first time you set up your computer or the follow-up attempts you made trying to do the same thing,” Calvin told the audience.

Three Zen of Python tenets in particular — “Beautiful is better than ugly,” “Explicit is better than implicit,” and “Simple is better than complex” — are at the core of Calvin’s presentation. To simplify development using Python, and help developers avoid potential pitfalls, Calvin recommends:

• avoiding the use of sudo and any system versions of Python,
• using pyenv to install and manage multiple versions and environments,
• using pipx to install tools; and
• using Docker and piptools to manage dependencies and create repeatable environments.

Watch the presentation:

For more on bootstrapping your local environments and the Zen of Python, read Calvin’s blog post, “The Zen of Python: Bootstrapping Your Local Python Environment.”

Links and Resources to Get Started:

• pyenv setup documentation: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv#installation
• pipx setup documentation: https://pypi.org/project/pipx/
• pip-tools setup documentation: https://pypi.org/project/pip-tools/
• PyCon 2022 talks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2Uw4_HvXqvYeXy8ab7iRHjA-9HiYhRQl