Link your favorite Python conference talk and give everyone else a chance to be blown away like you were the first time you heard it!
Please also include some description of what you liked about the talk. Also, the only requirement is that it is at least tangentially related to Python, so talks about developing in Python, developing CPython, general programming techniques that also apply to Python, some Python library, or even the community are all fair game.
Also, feel free to submit more than one talk, but please include only one talk per top-level comment so that we can have a place to discuss each one.
My favorite PyCon talk comes from, who else, Raymond Hettinger at PyCon US 2013 and is titled Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python.
I had been a Python developer for maybe a year-and-half at this point and was starting to grok some more advanced concepts. But, I remember walking out of that talk thinking about how excited Raymond was about Python and how to make Python code beautiful. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few, but most everything I learned about in that talk (like context managers, looping over dictionary key/value pairs, counting with dictionaries, and decorators) have all really stuck with me and influenced how I tackle problems.
Another one of my favorite conference talks comes from DjangoCon 2012. It’s a keynote in the DjangoCon tradition of “Why I Hate Django”. This one is called Why I Think Django Is Presently on a Collision Course with Extinction by Geoff Schmidt, one of the co-creators of Meteor.
This was my first DjangoCon and my first “Why I Hate Django” talk.
Some I have enjoyed and learned from are:
- Joel Grus - Learning Data Science Using Functional Python
- Joel Grus - I don’t like notebooks
- Matthew Seal - Notebooks as Functions with Papermill
