Schedule
PyTexas will be entirely online, featuring 22 thirty-minute long talks. Talks will be streamed on a 2020/schedule over the conference days, and most speakers will be avalilable to live chat while their talk is streaming.
You can see all talks via this YouTube playlist, or browse the 2020/schedule below.
Saturday, October 24th
9:30 AM - 10:00 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Keystone Sponsor Talk: How to Build and Deploy Your First Python Slackbot on DigitalOcean's App Platform
Building a Slackbot has never been easier. Join Mason Egger as he "live codes" a Slackbot in Python, demonstrating how to send messages and listen to events from Slack. No need for servers or complex configurations, just bring your code and deploy to DigitalOcean's App Platform.
Speaker: Mason Egger
Mason is currently a Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean who specializes incloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and Python. Prior to his work at DigitalOcean he was an SRE helping build and maintain a highly available hybrid multicloud PaaS. He is an avid programmer, musician, educator, and writer/blogger at masonegger.com. In his spare time he enjoys reading, camping, kayaking, and exploring new places.10:00 AM - 10:30 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Serverless Web Apps in Python
Serverless technologies have a lot of people excited - in theory, they offer infinite scaling with no maintenance. After mostly seeing “hello-world on Lambda” tutorials, I was curious how it would work for a real application with a frontend and a database. This talk reviews my experience using AWS Lambda for full-stack web applications. If you’re familiar with the theory and want to know more 2020/about how it works in practice, you’re in the right place.
Speaker: Sanjay Siddhanti
Sanjay is an Engineering Manager at Alpha Health. He loves building software that helps patients have a better experience with healthcare. His interests include data engineering, web development, bioinformatics, and dev ops. Sanjay has a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University. Outside of software, he enjoys sports, cooking, and meditation.10:30 AM - 11:00 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Developing a Security Mindset: Practical Lessons for Pythonistas
Develop your security mindset, with a little help from the luminaries of British detective fiction.
Speaker: Hayley Denbraver
Hayley has a background in Python development and developer advocacy. She lives in Seattle with her husband and her labrador puppy. She loves to make technical education fun and is delighted to be part of PyTexas 2020. She has read 25 of Agatha Christie's 66 mystery novels.11:00 AM - 11:30 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Practicality Beats Purity: The Zen of Python's Escape Hatch?
The Zen of Python, the well known list of 20 Python aphorisms (of which only 19 are written down), contains a lot of prescriptive advice for what makes "Good" Python code… or it would, if one of them didn't give you permission to ignore the rest of them. Focusing on but one of the 19 aphorisms, this talk explores the contradictions in the Zen of Python's advice, and how even with prescriptive rules, writing "Good" Python remains a subjective exercise.
Speaker: Christopher Neugebauer
Christopher Neugebauer is an Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organiser, who presently lives in the United States. He serves as a Director and Vice-Chair of the Python Software Foundation, and when All This is not currently preventing it, is co-organiser of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in a live music venue in Petaluma, California. By day, Christopher works as an Engineering Manager at AlphaSights, where he uses Kotlin to build communications tools that put clients around the world in touch with knowledge they need.11:30 AM - 12:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Feature engineering: the dark magic behind data science
Machine Learning models are often perceived as dark magic, but they’re only as good as the data they’re trained on. Feature engineering is where the real magic happens! In this talk, I’ll share some of my favourite spells for data engineering.
Speaker: Serena Peruzzo
Serena is data scientist at Shopify, currently based in Toronto, Canada. Previously, she has worked both in academia as an ML researcher and in the industry as a data science consultant on the Australian, British and Canadian markets. Serena is passionate 2020/about education, community and tech for good and she splits her free time between mentoring data science students, organizing meetups and volunteering.12:00 PM - 12:30 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: DevPI: The Tool You Never Knew You Needed
DevPI is a PyPI-compatible package repository. A primary use is to cache packages for off-line development. Another use is to host private packages for internal development. Finally, it can be used to stage uploads to a master repository.
Speaker: Moshe Zadka
Moshe is a core Twisted contributor, and has contributed to core Python. He has building and deploying web applications since 2001.12:30 PM - 1:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: DRYDock: Techniques for Not Repeating Yourself in Dockerfiles
You know how Dockerfiles tend to get copied around from one project to the next? It’s messy and bug-prone. Well I figured out how to stop doing that, and start treating Dockerfiles like the actual infrastructure-as-code libraries that they are. So can you!
Speaker: Micah Culpepper
Six years ago, with a shiny new CCNA in my hand, I started my IT career as a network administrator. I taught myself some Python, and then things escalated quickly. Now I'm a devops engineer in the field of network automation. Python, Docker, and Linux are my usual tools, with a bit of Golang sprinkled in. I live in San Antonio with my wife and three cats. In my non-work hours, I enjoy baking bread, gardening, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. My pronouns are she/they.1:00 PM - 1:30 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Everyday Design Patterns: Facade Pattern
Directly integrating dependencies into business logic couples our code to something we do not control. Changes made to upstream packages require us to update integration code across the project. This talk demonstrates how the Facade pattern can improve software design and simplify testing.
Speaker: Aly Sivji
Aly Sivji is a Canadian expat living in Chicago. By day, he builds backend systems. By night, he is a co-organizer of the Chicago Python Users Group (ChiPy). Aly is an active participant in ChiPy’s Mentorship Program and he loves helping intermediate developers become experts. Outside of Python, Aly enjoys cycling, reading, and rewatching old TV shows.1:30 PM - 2:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Am I a bad person? Beginner mistakes with privacy and ownership
GDPR shook things up for tech in 2018. CCPA is doing the same. It’s our responsibility to respect our users’ data. But as beginners, sometimes we don’t know better. We’ll walk through morally grey mistakes I’ve made when creating client-facing Flask apps and how to fix them up like a good netizen.
Speaker: Abby Carey
Abby is a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud. She's currently working on tooling and creating a better Python developer experience. Coming from a Technical Writing background, she has always had a passion for helping developers find solutions to their problems. In her down time, she tinkers with VR web development, studies Python fundamentals, and can't put down a good fan fiction.2:00 PM - 2:30 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk:
What You Can Do With __init__.py (But Probably Shouldn’t)
What is __init__.py doing? Why is it in all of my directories? If
you’re just starting out learning Python (or even if you’ve been using it for
decades), these might be questions you’ve asked before. This talk is all 2020/about
__init__.py: its history, its usage, and what can go wrong with it.
Speaker: William Horton
William Horton is a Senior Software Engineer at Compass, where he works on systems for ingesting, processing, and serving millions of real estate listings. In his spare time, he blogs and speaks 2020/about deep learning, contributes to open-source Python libraries like fastai and pytorch, and competes in computer vision competitions on Kaggle. When he’s not doing tech things, he enjoys powerlifting and singing a cappella.2:30 PM - 3:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Gathering Insights from Audio Data
Audio data is all around us. In this talk, we’ll look at ways to use Python and audio-data focused libraries to extract features and train predictions models using audio data.
Speaker: Ryan Bales
Ryan Bales is the Director of Analytics Engineering at DialogTech. He’s an active member of the Cleveland technology community, CLE Data Science and R Meetup groups. Ryan is a content contributor and class facilitator for the Python Data Science course track at DriveIT. When not writing code or trying to learn more 2020/about data science you can find Ryan trying to not lose at online video games. Ryan lives in Cleveland, Ohio.Sunday, October 25th
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: The Amazing Mutable, Immutable Tuple and Other Philosophic Digressions
Everyone knows Python tuples are immutable, but an immutable tuple that contains mutable objects is itself mutable. Or is it? What is immutability? Or equality? What is “is”? And what does Humpty Dumpty have to say 2020/about it? In this talk, we examine what these terms mean in far too much fun detail.
Speaker: Al Sweigart
Al Sweigart is a software developer and tech book author living in San Francisco. Python is his favorite programming language, and he is the developer of several open source modules for it. His books, including Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, are freely available under a Creative Commons license on his website https://inventwithpython.com/. His cat weighs 10 pounds.10:30 AM - 11:00 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Bridge the Trust Gap with Ethical AI
As you prioritize Ethical AI, it can be daunting to determine the correct path forward. This session will arm you with simple tools and technologies to build trust in your models and start implementing ethical AI within your organization today.
Speaker: Gabriella Lio
I am 25 years young and hail from the great state of Texas. After completing my Masters of Science in Business Analytics degree from UT Austin (Hook em' Horns forever), I joined the brilliant, creative, human, and fun Data Science team at Sense Corp, a tech consulting firm headquartered in Austin. When I'm not building models in Python and hanging out with my co-workers, you can find me exploring all the trails Austin has to offer, lounging on the lake, or catching my favorite band, the Spazmatics every Wednesday!11:00 AM - 11:30 AM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: How Decorators Function
Have you ever seen those “@” tags on top of Python functions and classes? Those are decorators - functions that wrap around other functions. Confusing? At first, but they’re easy with practice. Useful? Very! We’ll learn how they work, how to write our own, and how and when to use them.
Speaker: Andrew Knight
Andy Knight is the “Automation Panda” - an engineer, consultant, and international speaker who loves all things 2020/about software. His main passion is building solutions for software testing problems. He has designed and built robust test automation solutions for operating systems, service APIs, and Web apps with thousands of tests running continuously. He also mentors others in good development, testing, and BDD practices. Andy currently works full-time as the Lead Software Engineer in Test at PrecisionLender, a Q2 company. Read his tech blog at AutomationPanda.com, and follow him on Twitter at @AutomationPanda.11:30 AM - 12:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Nornir: Solve Big Problems Fast
Nornir is an extremely powerful Python automation framework. It is Python from top to bottom; made to be used by Python, for Python, and in Python. If you’re sick of learning a new pseudo-language or writing logic into YAML files, just to automate a simple task, Nornir is for you.
Speaker: Brett Lykins
Brett Lykins is a Managing Consultant at Network to Code. He has been in the networking field since 2007, most recently spending 6 years at Rackspace Technology prior to joining Network to Code. Brett has a passion for helping businesses achieve success through innovative technologies, network automation, and process improvement.12:00 PM - 12:30 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: There’s a Snake in the Birdhouse! Building a Python Culture at Vrbo
We all love Python, but not everyone is able to use it at their job. I’ll detail the journey I took to establish Python as a first-class option within my company. Viewers will leave having learned from my experiences and with a solid plan for creating a Python culture at their company.
Speaker: Mason Egger
Mason is currently a Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean who specializes incloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and Python. Prior to his work at DigitalOcean he was an SRE helping build and maintain a highly available hybrid multicloud PaaS. He is an avid programmer, musician, educator, and writer/blogger at masonegger.com. In his spare time he enjoys reading, camping, kayaking, and exploring new places.12:30 PM - 1:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Automate the Boring, Expensive Bits: Python in Lambda
Does your organization still have human bean counters with giant abacuses manually creating reports? Learn how a Python newbie automated compliance reports and normalized how an organization perceived their systems by using Python and AWS Lambda, saving the U.S. government thousands of dollars.
Speaker: Ryan Hillard
Ryan Hillard is a systems developer at the U.S. Small Business Administration. He has a history of working in both private and public sector environments, developing back office systems as well as customer facing applications. Ryan currently oversees his agency’s cloud infrastructure in Amazon Web Services, which powers critical websites and web applications such as SBA.gov, SBIR.gov, and NWBC.gov. He splits his time between web development and infrastructure. In the past, he has spoken at GitHub Constellation and helped organize the first DevOpsDays Houston event.1:00 PM - 1:30 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Creating Quality Sample Code
With the launch of Twitter Developer Labs, we were releasing new API endpoints which no one had ever used before it was important that we created code in such a way that accessible to anyone. This talk will focus on the processes we used to create sample code.
Speaker: Jessica Garson
Jessica Garson is a Python programmer, educator, and artist. She currently works at Twitter as a Developer Advocate. Previously, she was an adjunct professor teaching Python at NYU and worked at ISL, Burson-Marstellar, The National Education Association, ISSI Data, and Salsa Labs. Before working in technology, Jessica worked on numerous political campaigns throughout the country. She has run many meetups and conferences including DC’s Tech Lady Hackathon in 2016 and 2017, and DC’s Hack&&Tell. In her spare time, she is on a never-ending quest for the perfect vegan snack.1:30 PM - 2:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Minimize Cloud costs through multi-cloud serveless applications
Let’s face it, Cloud isn’t as cheap as we thought, especially for non USA based companies. We can however take advantage of free tier usage from various providers. My talk will detail how this can be done. How to deploy, monitor and maintain serverless apps in various cloud providers and save.
Speaker: Erance Sendelani Magoro
Customer-Centric, Passionate 2020/about Technology and Innovative. I have been involved in several exciting projects from the Architectural phase through to Production over the past 14 years. I have diverse experience across several industries including banking, health-care, finance, insurance and consulting houses. My "Can do" attitude coupled with good work ethic has earned me much respect from my peers and continues to do so. I am a self-taught technologist who never stops learning and improving. "Always aspiring to make today’s altitude a vantage point for tomorrows" is a personal motto I've always lived by.2:00 PM - 2:30 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: What to Do When the Bug Is in Someone Else's Code
When there’s a bug in a library you are using it’s easy to feel stuck or to accrue a lot of technical debt trying to work around it. In this talk, I’ll go over strategies for solving both your short-term needs (fix it!) and your long term needs (not more technical debt…).
Speaker: Paul Ganssle
Paul Ganssle is a software developer, CPython core developer, maintainer of python-dateutil and setuptools and contributor to many other open source projects. He lives in New York City with 14 cats, 293 geckos and a marmoset (who is currently working her way through dental school).2:30 PM - 3:00 PM CT Watch livestream for this talk
Talk: Building a Sensor Network with LoRaWAN and Python
LoRaWAN is a protocol for transmitting data over long distances with low power and open radio spectrum. This presentation will introduce you to LoRaWAN and its uses and show you how use Raspberry PIs and Python to build a network of sensors to collect data over long distances.
