The People at PyCon India (2016)

Published: 09/12/2016

PyCon Venue in New Delhi

This past September, I went to my first ever developer conference: PyCon India. It was an amazing experience. I came across so many amazing people doing amazing things. Here's a list of five such people.

1/ Baishampayan Ghose (BG)

BG was one of the three keynote speakers at PyCon. His keynote was titled ‘The postmodern programmer'. He talked about how a programmer in 2016 needs to be more than just someone who commits code to GitHub. He talked about the complexities and unpredictable nature production code. He also shared his experience with distributed systems with us. He advised us to only use DSs when absolutely necessary.

You can find BG at @ghoseb.

2/ Dinesh Kumar

I met Dinesh after his talk on flying a drone at PyCon. We talked about his job at ThoughtWorks and how he had been trying to get into Machine Learning off late. He told me he has hard time getting his head around the math behind ML algorithms.

I don't have Dinesh's twitter but, here's his GitHub.

3/ Anand Chitipothu

Anand's a big name in the Python community in India (and the world?). He goes by @anandology on IRC. You must've seen him if you've ever been to #pythonindia on freenode. Anand gave a talk on Generators at PyCon this year.

You can find Anand at @anandology.

4/ Suhas SG

Suhas's talk was my favorite. It was about abstract syntax trees or ASTs. We hacked the Python AST together! Suhas walked us through some live examples during the talk. My favorite one was where we hacked a file to change a variable name (ID) inside it. Just imagine how evil that is… imagine doing that to a large Python project…

You can find Suhas @jargnar.

5/ Jaidev Deshpande

Jaidev is someone who I didn't interact with one on one. But, I just have to include him in this list because of the lightning talk[1] he gave. His talk was about ‘Predicting future PyCon India talks'. Jaidev took his dataset as the talks submitted to PyCon India in the past and also if the talk was selected or not. He ran all this thorough a classifier and shared the result with us. The conclusion was really interesting!

You can find Jaidev @jaidevd.

Bonus

Arjoonn Sharma

Arjoonn was my PyCon buddy. He and I attended together. This was his second PyCon. I would have been pretty lost without him. Arjoonn is hands down one of the coolest people I know and spending the weekend at PyCon with him was so much fun.

Make sure you check Arjoonn out @arjoonn1. He also writes a blog here.

[1] A lightning talk is a very short presentation lasting only a few minutes, given at a conference.