As Europython got more hectic and my 3G connection got more erratic, my daily blogging ceased. So this roundup is mostly the result of notes I wrote on the train journey through the picturesque Welsh Borders back home to Cardiff. These are the talks that made an impact on me.

GIL isn’t Evil Russell Winder, who is every inch the sterotype of a former theoretical physicist, showed some simple benchmarks of threads vs Parallel Python vs Multiprocessing which showed that you could get good parallel speed-up in python by using the latter two approaches. We have a number of people who use Numpy and Scipy on the cluster and it would be interesting to see if we could get some quick speedups for them using these approaches.

Twisted, AMQP and Thrift A quick introduction to AMQP and the fact that lots of big financial companies are ripping out Tibco/IBM MQ to make way for AMQP. These guys wrote twisted interfaces to AMQP and Thrift so that you can make Thrift RPC calls and everything magically goes over AMQP. It was interesting but without taking a serious look through some example code I’m not sure that it will be useful for any of my particular projects.

PIPPER A python system where you add comments very much like OpenMP pragmas allowing you to parallelise For loops. It does this by serialising the function and the data that go to it and sending it over MPI to a c-based engine that runs the function and returns the data over MPI. This is nice because it lets you take advantage of the MPI and Interconnect on a proper compute cluster. However it can’t handle the full language set of python and you can’t use c extensions. Which means Numpy and Scipy are out of the window. Which is a shame because most of the codes that you could trivially parallelise with this system use Numpy.

Python and CouchDB An opinionated Mozilla hacker talking about how awesome CouchDB is. I understood it a bit more by the end of the session and kind of wondered what it would be like to dump log files straight into it. The talk in the corridors was the MongoDB looked a bit more production oriented. However I managed to miss that talk so will have to look it up later.

Keynote by Bruce Eckel. He started by pimping the unconference idea, which looked good to me. And got me thinking about whether there might be room for the approach at work. The language archaeology part was entertaining but I can’t remember a single thing from it.

Ctypes This was a really useful talk. Greg Holliing did a good job of going through some of the pitfalls of ctypes such as 32/64 bit int mis-match with the underlying c API. So you should always cast to one of the ctypes types to make it explicit what you are passing through. This was probably the talk that is most likely to make an impact on my production code over the next twelve months.

OpenERP In hindsight I should have also gone to the OpenObject talk which explained the underlying data model. The best thing about this was that each module can stand alone. i.e you can install the inventory module or the CRM module without all the others. OpenERP speaks a Web Services API so it would be very easy to develop against it. There is a chance I may be able to solve some of the organisational challenges at work by throwing this tech at them.

Python for System Admin A good talk somewhat hampered by John Pinner’s need to support Python2.2 so some of the code example looked a bit strange. John is of the opinion that argparse is better than optparse (which I habitually use). One of the other attendees pointed me to a pycon2009 talk on argparse which apparently explains the difference.

Software Apprenticeship An interesting approach to training programmers that made a lot of sense to me. In Britain we have an awful tendency to belittle vocational training in comparison to academic education when for a great many professions we could do with more of the former and less of the latter. Lots to think about and Christian Theune provided a wealth of advice based on his practical experience of helping to train apprentices.

This was my first EuroPython and I found it educational and entertaining. I was exposed to lots of interesting technology, some of which may improve my daily work. More important than that was the opportunity to talk to other Python developers about their experiences of using Python to get real work done. EP is in Birmingham again next year so I have no excuse not to attend. Many thanks to all the hard-working people who helped to organise this conference and the wonderful delegates who made it so much fun to attend.