PyCon India 2015 was my first PyCon as an attendee, speaker & volunteer.

When I first heard about PyCon in BangPypers meetup, I thought PyCon India is just like a big meetup with a little bit of planning & preparation. But by the end of conference, I have realised that organising PyCon is a very very huge task. It needs a great deal of preparation, planning up things and dedicated volunteers who are interested and patient enough to spend lots of time to run it.

Nicholas Tollervey was keynote speaker. He came to venue on October 1st(two days before conference) and helped volunteers with some tasks. He did the same on next day too. I was wondering whether he came for key note speaking or volunteering.

I have been talking to many people on mailing lists, github and other channels. Finally I was able to meet & talk with many of them in person.

I was not able to attend all sessions but many people said this

It was good to see some of 2nd & 3rd year B.Tech students, who were familiar with django & were contributing to many upstream packages. Some students were even using Emacs as their editor.

Toddlers were also interested to attend PyCon



I have planned to make Python logo mosaic with rubik cubes. I thought it will take ~10 hours to complete it. When I got there with cubes, Vignesh U, Apoorva, Ram Mohan, Sayan Chowday and many other volunteers came forward and completed it in an hour.




I was eagerly waiting for PyCon India from past few months. PyCon India was just like a cool breeze! Ah...!!

Update:

How the hell did I forget about swag kit marathon?

Day before conference, we had to prepare swag kits for participants. I don't know whose idea it was to prepare it like this, that but it was brilliant and most fun part.

File Manager:

Functions Vs Methods:

Attributes:

In [40]: f.__dict__
Out[40]: {'state': 1}

In [49]: C.m.__dict__
Out[49]: {'state': 2}

In [52]: hasattr(C().m, 'state')
Out[52]: True

In [53]: getattr(C().m, 'state')
Out[53]: 3

{% if books %}
  {% for book in books %}
    <li>{{ book }}</li>
  {% endfor %}
{% else %}
  <li>Sorry, there are no books.</li>
{% endif %}

{% for book in books %}
  <li>{{ book }}</li>
{% empty %}
  <li>Sorry, there are no books.</li>
{% endfor %}

$ while true; do python manage.py runserver; sleep 4; done

while true; do
  echo "Re-starting Django runserver"
  python manage.py runserver
  sleep 4
done

Why Elegant Git Logs Matter?

I will show You few commit messages & logs from two different projects. Based only on those messages/logs, You need to decide which project is the best.

Project 1:

Project 2:

I hope that explains why We need  to maintain elegant git logs.

How To Maintain Elegant Logs?

First let's see how to write good commit messages. There are several blog  posts  & guides about this. Here is the summary of all those taken from this article.

1. Separate subject from body with a blank line
2. Limit the subject line to 50 characters
3. Capitalize the subject line
4. Do not end the subject line with a period
5. Use the imperative mood in the subject line
6. Wrap the body at 72 characters
7. Use the body to explain what and why vs. how

If You are doing something hacky, writing a little message in commit on why you did that will help other developers to understand that a lot better. Even if You don't follow all rules, some of them will help you in writing great commit message next time. If You are mainainter of a project, ask Your team members to write meaningful messages.

The next that need to be taken care is commits. If a team member or someone else has submitted a pull request, once you merge the commit, just rebase it to remove unnecessary merge commits from log. Also make sure to squash  redundant commits and You have almost a linear log.
A side benefit of this is, You can see recent commit there instead of merge commit, if your project is hosted on github.


The two minutes You spent on writing a meaningful message or maintaining linear log will
will help You a  lot few months down the line & will save countless hours and sleepless nights for future contributors.


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or as Zen of Python says "Readability Counts".

PEP8 Style Guide:

Since code is read more than it is written, it is very important to make sure that the code is readable. Python has coding convetions(PEP8 style guide) to maintain consistency in code and thereby making it more readable.

There are lot of tools (like pep8, flake8, pylint) to check if Your code is in compliance with PEP8. Today most of the IDE/text editors have plugins which check for these errors and report it on the fly. If You are writing code from scratch, You can make sure that You are following coding conventions.

However once in a while You have to read/bug-fix other people's code who don't follow these conventions(or You might even stumble across Your old piece of code). Once You are accustomed to style guide, it will be uneasy to read inconsistent code. Here is a badly formatted Python file opened in Emacs editor(with flymake & flake8 configured)

Auto PEP8:

Formatting code to PEP8 style is boring & time consuming process. So instead of manually formatting code, You can use autopep8 package which automatically formats Python code to conform to the PEP 8 style guide.

To install the package run
If You have a file foo.py as show above, You can run

Emacs Integration:

As emacs is extremely configurable editor, with just couple of lines of lisp, we can integrate autopep8 to emacs. Just find where autopep8 is installed; write a function which runs autopep8 on current buffer; bind a key to that function; set a hook, so that when ever You save a file, it will be automatically run the function.

This works reasonably well. But I do recommend using Elpy for Python developemnt in emacs. I have just sent a pull request to integrate autopep8 with elpy.

Formatting:

Beyond PEP8:

As we have learnt to auto PEP8 code, it is the time to look beyond PEP8. There is a good talk by Raymond Hettinger on that - Beyond PEP8, Best practices for beautiful intelligible code.

Let Machines take care of PEP8 & Let Humans look Beyond PEP8.

References:

[1] Code is read much more often than it is written, so plan accordingly.
Python - PEP8 style guide.
Autopep8 - formats Python code to conform to the PEP 8.
PEP8ify - modifies python source code to conform to PEP8.
Elpy, the Emacs Lisp Python Environment.


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