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PyCon China 2013 Shanghai participation report

A report of Nexedi's first trip in Pycon China in 2013.
  • Last Update:2013-12-23
  • Version:001
  • Language:en

Hello, This is Yan Ni from Nexedi SA. On 8th December 2013, the CEO of Nexedi KK Yusei Tahara and me participated in the PyCon China 2013 Shanghai Conference. As the only foreign speaker who comes from Japan, Yusei gave a speech named of “Python without files system” to the Chinese Pythoners.


PyCon China Community

Each year, PyCon Conference is held around the world by the Python programming language lovers. PyCon APAC 2013 was held in Japan in September this year.

It is the third time that PyCon carried out its performance in China. PyCon China 2013 are held separately in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhuhai ( 8th December) and Beijing (14th December).  It is pretty rare to see the PyCon Conference held in different cities separately in one country, but very reasonable for a country like China who has such a wide land.



Official website

http://cn.pycon.org/2013

Venue in Shanghai

http://cn.pycon.org/2013/shanghai

Date

8th December, 2013

Language

Chinese

Fees for attendance

Free

Address

Pu Ruan Building

Participants

Around 250 - 350


PyCon China trip

Yusei Tahara, who has participated in PyCon Japan and PyCon United States has been a Pythoner for 10 years as his daily work has a very close relation with Python.  Nexedi has set up the the international strategy of entering the Chinese Market, so I went to Shanghai to assist Yusei for his speech.

Registration

I found the event on Turing website where all the IT events are listed each month. After getting in touch with the organizers, I proposed them a series of topics created in Nexedi that relate to Python. Finally, we both agreed on the topic “Python without file system”. Yusei were going to give the speech on behalf of Nexedi. We decided to attend the rehearsal on Saturday afternoon.

Headed to Shanghai

I left Paris on Thursday and planned to meet Yusei in Shanghai on Friday. In real, because of the thick fog and terrible PM2.5 in Shanghai, both our planes delayed. I spent six hours in the airport Charles De Gaulle, and he waited 2 hours more for boarding in Japan. It was not a very smooth beginning, but didn't influence our passion for Pycon China. When we arrived in Shanghai ,we can smelled the difference in the air which was not very pleasant at all.

Rehearsal on Saturday

The rehearsal was held in the conference room of AutoDesk located in Pudong which was sponsored by Google. In order to improve the quality of the presentation for the next day, 13 people including part of speakers and organizers attended the rehearsal. Speakers presented their speeches and presentations one by one, so as to get advices from audiences on the content, as well as to control the time. Yusei's speech was generally good, just need to shorten the information that was displayed on each slide. He did the modification soon after.

The rehearsal lasted from 13h30 to 18h. Every speaker got improvement on their speech and we went to a nice Chinese restaurant to have the welcoming dinner together. It was also organized by China Google Developer Group.

Day of the event

The sign-in started at 8h30. Weather was pretty good except there's still heavy fog, from the building, we could hardly see clearly the outside.

Organizers were very busy with the preparation, the venue was taken place in the a conference hall ( about 200 seats) of Pudong Software Park. The symbol of Pycon changed from snakes to dragons, which is a very admirable symbol in China. All the speakers received dark blue caps with the symbol on it and audiences received one as gifts.

Finally started

With the announcement by Sting Chen, who is the leader of organizers, the Pycon China 2013 Shanghai finally began.

Video letter from the author of Leo

Edward K. Ream's, who is the author of Leo, sent a video letter to Chinese Pythoners, which was shown at the beginning of the conference. Leo is an editor tool which was developed 13 years ago, based on Python platform that possesses an unique world view. Leo, similar to Emacs, provides self – expanding function. Even though Yusei had never used Leo, but he found it would be very interesting to try this unique way of thinking.

System design DAE

DAE is a system foundation of Douban, a leading SNS in China. Hong Qiangning, the CTO of Douban explained that DAE (Douban Adorable Engine) is a system that present value visibility to end users. Currently, there are 427 applications includes 126 external apps, dealing with 2.4 billion dynamic requests each day on 32 nodes. Using DAE, helps the code separation, re-using fundamental infrastructure such as MySQL & BeansDB, as well as simplifying the new project implementation.

Celery distributed design

Celery is introduced by Ye Jianye, the CTO of Glow Inc, who has been using Python for 4 years on web/mobile server development and data analysis. Glow use Celery for tasks such as sending push notifications, emails and so on. It works as the following work flow: Producer sends a task to the Broker; Broker sends it to task queue according to the category; there is at least one worker in each task queue to execute new task and delete old task. By using the celery, they can reduce the reaction time of server, isolate the heavy task into a individual server (avoiding influence on other process), as well as execute a series of code at a reserved time. Currently, the Brokers that Celery supported are RabbitMQ and Redis, others like MongoDB, AmazonSQS,ect are still in the experimental phase.

Lunch break

The morning session ended up, Subway sandwiches and mineral drinks were distributed free of charge to all participants for lunch. We had our lunch and took a little rest in the room which was particularly prepared for speakers. We had a some discussions with other speakers and returned back to the big hall.

In the afternoon, the event was divided into two parts: one was for the rest speeches, the other was called Codelab which was about tutorial of OpenStack and Open ERP. The participants were able to write actual code on their own computers along with the instructors.

The afternoon session


Python community's latest report: “Open source and I”

KJ, a key member of the GDG China and Hsiaoming Yang, the creator of Python Community China site announced the latest news and statement of this community. Even he is the most active member in China Github, because of his “Otaku character”, the community is not very well-known. He announced that he would try to be more sociable to attract more pythoners to the community and create high - quality contents in Chinese together.

Python without file system

It was the presentation given by Yusei. He introduced the mechanism of sharing the latest code across clusters automatically by saving the code in database in stead of writing python code in the file system. This mechanism is developed recently in ERP5, an open source ERP based on Python. He was also involved in the development team. By using this mechanism, deploying the latest code becomes easier than before.

Yusei answered a couple of questions at the end of his speech. As english is the basic for programmers, there's no difficulties for the audiences to understand his speech. However, it was still hard for them to speak fluently comparing \ with their skills in writing, reading and listening.

Learning python with Weixin --- Crossin's programming classroom

It was about a Python learning system developed by Yuan Xin (Crossin). He is using Django, Restricted Python and JQuery Mobile to develop this learning system on Weixin platform with the Official Account's name: “Crossin's programming classroom” for people who start learning programming for the first time. What was interesting of this talk was that this idea came from a “beautiful girl” who wanted to learn Python, which motivated him to develop such a system to deliver python education to the public.

Public cloud architecture based on Python

Introduction of services of using Python in the public cloud by Zheng Ke from SpeedyCloud. The announcement was made by analogy to the cloud system of popular video game StarCraft2.

How to develop an interview assessment system in 2 days

The speech was given by Lv Zhaogang, Duan Huajie, who both come from Da Zhong Dianping (a city-life consuming Guide site). They introduced how to develop an interview assessment system in 2 days in order to simplify the work of HR and reducing the number of files used by them. The system was built by using the Django web framework of Python.

A breath of fresh air Renaissance in Python created by “Sedimentary sugar”

Sedimentary sugar”(Dui Tang) was created by Cao Wenjiong and two other developers in 2010. It is a community operating site based on Python, as well as Java. The flow has increased 40 times after 3 years operation. From this case, you can feel that the power of “Shanghai Silicon Valleyi” is booming.

Continuous integration that uses a Buildbot, Git and Docker

­The last one was talking about the construction of continuous integration system using Buildbot, Git and Docker by Adieu's that was created by the speaker recently. Git is well-know from the result of the field survey, however, Docker and Buildbot are lack of popularity. Continuous Integration is a concept that is currently attracting attention, but it did not seem widely known yet in China.

Ending and lottery

Lottery was held to end up the PyCon China 2013. Winners are chosed by a lottery system, and the gifts were Python books. There are plenty of winners and a decent number of presents were given out.

In the end, KJ and Sting delivered the ending speech. In the evening, some audiences joined for the gather-togather buffet for further discussion.

End of the trip

This is our first participation in Pycon China. The organizers and participants were very friendly and it was a pleasant experience. Most of the speakers started using Python around five years ago, however, we realize that the open source platform such as Python are becoming widely used at an amazing speed.

The speakers of Pycon China each year are basically the same, there are very few foreign speakers, we hope that there are more speakers join us and present their ideas about Python next year.