Day 2 of PyCon 2023

I had to do a meeting in the morning so I missed breakfast and the keynote for today, but I made it in time for a talk titled "How Python is Behind the Science of the James Webb Space Telescope." The speaker works as an Associate Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

He went through how the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) uses a variety of programming languages during the development and operation of JWST, but Python is the language of choice for most of the science conducted with the telescope.

He talked about some the history of JWST and showed many of the cool images it has sent back and how Python is used to process the data.

I should have stayed for the next talk that was in the same room on PyScript - I really want to learn more about PyScript, but I knew there were going to be other talks on PyScript and I was hungry and wanted something to eat.

After lunch, I sat in on a talk by Dave Aronson titled: "Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)." He's a funny guy. His talk was easily the most entertaining. Basically "mutation testing" is taking code and creating versions of it (mutants) with slight changes and seeing if the tests still pass. Because if they still pass it most likely means lax testing. So it not only tests code but importantly tests the quality of the tests.

I also spent some time in the Exhibit Hallway talking to some of the sponsors like Microsoft, Anaconda, and JetBrains.

In the afternoon, I sat in on talks like:

• "Reproducible molecular simulations with Python"
• "Create interactive games using MicroPython and electronics"
• "Using Python and PyQgis to make cool maps"
• "Three Musketeers: Sherlock Holmes, Mathematics and Python"

Now I realize this is probably a pretty esoteric mix of talks I chose, but it's what I wanted to see and there are plenty of other "normal" talks happening, but it shows how PyCon has a wide variety of talks.

I ended the day in the main ballroom listening to the "lightning talks", which I realized are some of the best talks at PyCon. Each person has five minutes to go through their topic. Some speakers would have code, others slides, or even a quick live demo - whatever they were passionate about. For example, one person did a talk about how she uses AWS Lambda and Python for her side job as a volunteer position at an animal rescue shelter. These were some of the best talks and it shows that you don't need a long time to communicate something really meaningful and interesting.