Austin Python User Group
Today I went to my first APUG meeting, I’d missed the ones in September and October due to a clash with a meeting back in Sydney, but this time I cleared my schedule to come along – and it was great! 
It was hosted by the good people from Enthought, who provided pizza and ‘soda’ for the attendees.
Austin has a vibrant community of Python users, there were around 20-30 people in attendance, most of whom use Python at whichever company they work for, and some of whom have never used Python but are keen to learn. We had people from the fields of web development, scientific computing, HPC, the media, as well as a few students, including one who studies economics at UT.
What surprised me the most was the presence of two Kiwis and another Aussie, who happened to be a UNSW mathematics graduate now working at Enthought – small world!
The session kicked off with a presentation from Peter Wang, the organiser of APUG, on Cython, which I found particularly interesting as I am currently looking into various solutions for C++<->Python interaction for my work on RoboCup, including SWIG and Boost::Python. Today’s presentation made me think for the first time of perhaps doing it the other way around – writing the system entirely in Python, with all the performance-critical parts implemented as C(++) extensions.
The second talk was from one of the New Zealanders, visiting from the University of Auckland, who was presenting his Python library for linear programming, PuLP.
After the main talks everyone introduced themselves, and suggested ideas for 10 minute lightning talks for the December meetup. I volunteered to talk about embedding Python in soccer-playing robots, so it’ll probably be an expansion of the 5 minute talk I gave on the same topic at PyConAu, not too long ago.
An aside: I must apologise to everyone who I said I would keep updated about my time in Austin via this blog, as you can see I haven’t posted since I left New York back in August. The truth is I’ve been having too much fun and keeping too busy here in Austin to have time to sit down and write about it. I had the topics of several blog posts lined up, but I’ve now decided I’m going to write them in the reverse order to which I’d intended, so expect to see the following posts on the following coming up soon:
- Joel Spolsky’s FogBugz & Kiln World Tour – why you should all use Kiln or something like it
- The University of Texas’ innovative IP quota system
- Configuring the Atlassian tools (Confluence, Jira, Crowd, Fisheye & Crucible) for rUNSWift on a clean Ubuntu 10.04 system
- Why programming is the only thing I don’t do in my web browser
- ‘First’ impressions of Austin, UT and the public transport system
So.. hopefully I’ll get around to all that sometime soon
Update 15/08/11: I never got around to writing these, and probably never will. Sorry!
November 12, 2010 at 9:26 am
“writing the system entirely in Python, with all the performance-critical parts implemented as C(++) extensions.” – Didn’t Michael Quinlan do this when he was still at Newcastle, shortly after rUNSWift released python for OPEN-R?
“The University of Texas’ innovative IP quota system” – I’d be interested in reading this one.
“Why programming is the only thing I don’t do in my web browser” – I’d be interested in debating this one.
November 12, 2010 at 11:56 am
I think Michael just wrote the whole system in Python, then started to replace parts of it with native C code – as opposed to Python C extensions, which is what I’m suggesting. The benefit of the latter is a) you can automatically generate a lot of the C extension code with Cython, and b) the object representation for the C objects and Python objects is the same, removing the need for conversions entirely.