PyCon Thailand 2019

—

by

Team Niteo
in

Website: https://th.pycon.org/en
Talks: http://yt.vu/c/UCtHekbmBXtp5AYSVARFQQiw (to be uploaded)

It is the first conference I ever attended, my first foreign trip, and the first opportunity to give a talk. In short, it was an incredible and unforgettable experience for me.

Positives

  • Friendly, energetic and very helpful people.
  • Perfect venue: easy to reach technology park with dedicated rooms for conferences and similar programs.
  • A crowd of about 300 people.
  • Insightful keynote talks worth taking note of.
  • Most parts of the execution was flawless and strictly on schedule.
  • Party and food were great.
  • I won two gifts for answering a question in the quiz session.
  • Being a beginner friendly event, it encouraged me to do a lightning talk and introduce one of my libraries without any preparation.
Bangkok


View from True Digital Park – 7th floor, Bangkok, Thailand

Negatives

  • Projector display connectivity issues were there to trouble some speakers.
  • Wi-Fi visitor credentials were not working on my laptop and the staffs were only able to temporarily fix it by using credentials that they can’t share (i.e. if it disconnects, I have to ask for it again).
  • Most of the non-keynote talks were related to Machine Learning.
  • Most of the talks not related to Machine Learning were for beginners.
  • One of the talks I attended was fully in Thai, we had to read the English subtitles on the slides.
  • Weather was too humid.

Talks I attended

Day 1

9:05

How to meaningfully contribute to Python without being very good at programming:

Contributing != features != coding

It was a talk to encourage people from both technical and non-technical background to start contributing to opensource. The key point that I think concludes the whole talk is:

Contributing != features != coding

10:20

Unique ways to Hack into a Python Web Service

An Indian security researcher discussed many ways to hack into a web service. Most of them are obvious, yet often ignored.

  • JWT manipulation: Make the algorithm section of a JWT token None/some hackable algorithm.
  • JWT is easily decodable with something like jwt.io. So, secure the JWT payload.
  • Do not use only one private key for all the users (authenticated/unauthenticated).
  • Make the JWT lifetime short enough.
  • Make the secret complex enough.
  • Check for server-side template injection (scripts in the templating engine) vulnerabilities.
  • Avoid using root to deploy the service.
  • ODOR: Insecure Direct Object Reference: Avoid using predictable UID/GID.
  • Use robot script+ZAP (+jenkins integration).
  • Use dependency check libraries.
  • Demo: https://github.com/we45/pyconth2019.

11:10

Demystifying Conversational AI with Python

Just some introduction to conversation AI and Duolingo.

12:00

Automate the Boring Stuff with Slackbot

Demonstration of how easy it is to build a working slackbot.

  • https://github.com/lins05/slackbot: A slackbot framework.
  • Using incoming webhook (one way), block-kit and complex messages.
  • Introduction to errbot: A bot to connect to favorite chat services.

12:40

Lunch

lunchbox


Lunch box

13:40

Django e-commerce

The full talk was in Thai. But there were English subtitles in the slides.

14:30

Tech Skills: What’s Hot and What’s Not. How does Python stack-up against the rest?

The talk was about the current scenario of demand/availability of tech skills in different countries of Asia from an HR’s perspective.
A bunch of stats from StackOverflow.
All the points were very basic and I’m sure we all already have a pretty good idea about what’s hot and what’s not (given we are not riding the hype train).

15:20

Program Thinking – How do you design programs for diversity?

This talk was about how to bring more women into coding and how different initiatives are working on it. Specially #techladies.

16:10

Python in Production Engineering @ Facebook

This talk was about how Facebook release changes to production and the high demand for production Engineers.

Facebook Infrastructure Talk


Talk of Facebook Infrastructure

  • A production engineer must have the skills of a developer, a tester, a reviewer, a release manager, and OPS.
  • Production engineers are in high demand at Facebook.
  • Introduced opencompute.org project.
  • Promoted python unit testing library: https://github.com/facebookincubator/TestSlide

17:00

Lightning talks

  • coderdojo: coding for kids
  • Pycon Tokyo
  • Borg backup
  • TPA: Type Programming Association
  • Codemania
  • AutoBuddy: IOT app
  • fossasia.org

17:45

PyTorch as a modern scientific computing environment?

Talks about PyTorch vs numpy

18:30

Party


Party was awesome

Day 2

9:00

Ready to say goodbye to Python 2.7!?

  • Reminder of dropping Python 2 support
  • Promoted FossAsia.org
  • Q/As

9:50

Python made my dream come true

A hackathon winner from India explains how his project won him a trip to Google headquarters and job offers from “dream” companies.
A good point he made was, if we want to get more attention, we should invest our time and efforts in one big, long term project instead of many small weekend projects.

10:40

Security Issues on your Python Code

• SAST (Opensource Static Application Security Testing): fix security issues before UAT.
• Introduction to bandit

11:30

Python Everywhere?

This talk was a lot more informative as compared to other talks. The subject was to discuss different ways to bring Python to more devices (especially IoT). A good way to do it is to ship a compiled version of Python code instead of shipping the whole interpreter – probably using Web Assembly and how Beeware is working to make it possible.

13:15

Functional Programming in Python: Lessons from Haskell and Clojure

The talk was about how to use the goodies of functional programming in Python avoiding the common mistakes. The conclusion was, of course, Python is not internally built for functional programming, i.e. we have to compromise on things like speed and resource usage to use it as an FP language.

  • Don’t make non-local mutation.
  • Introduce side effect using the type system (like IO-bind in Haskel) (impure FP).
  • Build functional abstractions (wrappers) for mutating library.
  • Introduction to https://github.com/gvjacob/contracts: Enforce return types via contracts.

14:05

Hypothesis: Property-Based Testing for Python

This was an introduction to Hypothesis: A library that can be used with our favorite testing libraries. It feeds random values to the tests and tries to break it. It knows which inputs are most effective to break a test case.

  • Introduction to hypothesis.works
  • Randomly generates test inputs.
  • Has extras for Django, sci-py, dpcontracts, lark, pytz, dateutil.
  • It can generate the test cases itself in addition to generating input values.

14:55

A resilient, scalable tracing and analysis system for micro-services – HayStack

Haystack product introduction. An opensource software to trace logs in microservices in a highly complex platform.

15:45

Any Code Formatter You Like – As Long As It’s Black

A talk by one of the authors/maintainers of Black.

  • Introduction to black.
  • autopep8 only follows defined rules in pep8.
  • one big commit to the whole repository is better than a lot of incremental commits because it helps us avoid mixing code changes with code formatting commits.
  • To tell black to ignore a file: #use fmt off.
  • git-hyper-blame (skip black induced changes (py2 only)).
  • black –check (works after push).
  • Using editor integration is better than using pre-commits because it shows us how the code looks like in real time.
  • lookout for special comments like # noqa.

16:35

Lightning Talks, Auditorium (L6)

Here I introduced one of my libraries: https://github.com/sayanarijit/expandvars

17:35

How Python Can Excel

Talk on how to bring more enthusiasm into the Python ecosystem, i.e. organizing local conferences, initiatives like tech ladies, or getting involved with the existing ones.

18:20

Closing

A quick quiz session was held. I won a cup and a foldable travel bag.

Pycon Thailand 2019

Thanks to the staff, organizers and volunteers for putting the incredible effort to organize such a successful event and Niteo for sponsoring my trip and encouraging me to give a talk.

Team Niteo