PyCon 2011 Atlanta

Posted on March 31st, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

We attended the PyCon 2011 in Atlanta, GA early this month, which is the longest conference I’ve ever attended (March 9-17, 9 days total) but it was so worth it!  We’re mainly a Java shop and we’re fairly new to Python so PyCon really showed us what we can do with Python and all these tools available for it that could really help us with our development.  After the conference we’re pretty much convinced that Python is the way to go (unfortunately, it will take a lot of convincing to have all our apps converted to Python in our environment ).

The conference was broken up into 3 parts: first 2 days are tutorial days, followed by 3 days for the main conference, then 4 days of development sprints (our favorite).

For the tutorial days, we took the Python 101 tutorial (we probably should have taken the intermediate one but we still learned quite a bit in the 101 class) and the Python/Django deployment workshop as we’re really interested in Django.  Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the core developers of Django, taught the Django deployment class.  He went pretty fast since there were a lot to cover but it was pretty neat to see all these tools you can use for your development and deployment and the best ways to use them.  Such tools include virtualenv, pip, nginx, Fabric, Chef, and gunicorn.

For the main conference, we pretty much focused on Django so most of the talks we attended were related to Django.  There were a bunch of other interesting topics we attended as well, such as network programming, GPU computing with PyCUDA, and continuous deployment.  The keynote presentation by Hilary Mason at http://bit.ly was very good as well.

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Andrea Bocelli Concert

Posted on December 22nd, 2010 webmaster No comments          Print

My mom’s a big fan of Andrea Bocelli so when I found out he’s performing at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ early this month I got her tickets for it.  I’m not really a fan of Bocelli but I have to say that I really enjoyed the concert, probably almost as much as my mom did, this guy can really sing and he made it look so easy!

The concert was about two and a half hours long and I think he sang about four or five extra songs because the crowd wanted more .  The first half of the concert he sang  mostly his popular songs and the second half were all Christmas songs from his My Christmas album.  He also changed his outfit at the beginning of the second half to a white suit and joked that it didn’t really matter to him (he’s blind).

The sound quality was amazing and it was pretty packed.  If you’re attending an event here at the Prudential Center make sure to give yourself at least an hour extra as traffic can be pretty bad by the parking lots.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2010

Posted on November 26th, 2010 webmaster No comments          Print

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I was at the bookstore last week and I saw this book (or magazine, can’t remember) about this list of events to attend before you die.  Among them were Mardi Gras, Carnivale, and then the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade came up.  I was like, “hey, that’s coming up soon and it’s only about an hour away, I should check it out” and so I did.

I actually haven’t paid much attention to it before, I’ve probably seen it on TV once or twice.  The last few Thanksgivings I was usually still sleeping by the time the parade was over.  Yesterday, I woke up very early and took the 7AM bus to New York City to see the parade.  I got there around 8ish and, as expected, the place was already packed.  The parade started at Central Park West and it supposed to give the best views but I figured since the parade starts at 9AM it would probably be hard to find a good spot at this time.

I decided to just follow the crowd and I ended up between 6th Ave and 42 Street.  It was pretty chilly that day but at least it didn’t rain while the parade was going on (it rained later in the afternoon).  There were lots of floats to see, marching bands from different states, cheerleaders, and people dressed up in funny costumes.  There were also some famous people in the parade, such as Al Roker, Gladys Knight, Kanye West, Jessica Simpson, Joan Rivers, Ronald McDonald, Santa, and a bunch of other people I’ve never heard of but the people around me seem to know them.

Overall I enjoyed it, but I don’t think this is something I’d go see every year.  I think it’s pretty much the same every year so unless they make a big change at some point then this is probably the last time I’d go.  Well, that’s one off my list of things to do before I die .