I played a small part with a Poster Session on Sunday, the final session day. I talked about how and why we arrived at a Python codebase for my new project, Happify. My poster, below, is an unscientific look at various startup-friendly languages across axes like hiring, readability, produtivity, and performance. I spoke about the state of the NYC startup scene, how Python is on the rise, and why it’s a particularly good fit for small teams that require each member of the team to contribute at every layer of the stack. It was very well-received, sparking some vibrant post-session conversations on everything from Positive Psychology to creative use of Python decorators. My short intro video is here. You’ll see clearly I’d had insufficient sleep ond more-that-sufficient caffeine.

But the best aspect of Pycon for me was getting to know the community of folks that make the language thrive. For years I have been intrigued by the differences between various self-organizing open-source technical communities, with first-hand knowledge of the groups driving Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, and PostgreSQL. I have in mind a long post which will explore their similarities and differences, but I will pen a few words about Python here.

Python has a long history as a utilitarian “get things done” language. It’s wide adoption by academic and scientific programmers, as well as the web application startup scene has proven that its readability, lack of magic, and productivity are important to anyone writing code. Perhaps even more important than out-of-the-gate performance and concurrency. This cross-cutting eye toward utility is very clear at Pycon. Talks and Posters surrounding my own included explorations of computer vision, artificial intelligence, asynchronous evened programming, web frameworks, and even my favorite “Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes.” Get the language out of your way, and you can do anything from shooting rodents to making people happier through gaming.

Anyway, I’m excited to be a small part of the Python community.

And a PDF version: PyCon 2012 Poster

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Originally uploaded by andyparsons

Contentment in the laundry room. This is me testing wiring up Twitter to this blog.

I’m doing a casual study for a personal project  on how many variant user experiences there are for interconnecting Web apps I use frequently, and how unifying standard practices to cut down on clicks and enhance security could help data flow more freely.

After looking at this stuff for a bit, I felt like Izzy looks in this image.

There are too many impediments to interconnectivity.

But that’s OK; it forced me to consider which ones were important. Those I read daily were top of mind and easy to find. Those with which I play pound-the-weasel of unread items are useless anyway.

I urge you to try this. On purpose. If you can recover your blogroll, it’s no fun.

Stay tuned to see which it’ll be.