Hello,
This is Yan Ni from Nexedi SA. On 8th December 2013, the CEO of
Nexedi KK Yusei Tahara and me participated in the PyCon China 2013
Shanghai Conference. As the only foreign speaker who comes from
Japan, Yusei gave a speech named of “Python without files system”
to the Chinese Pythoners.
PyCon
China Community
Each
year, PyCon Conference is held around the world by the Python
programming language lovers. PyCon APAC 2013 was held in Japan in
September this year.
It
is the third time that PyCon carried out its performance in China.
PyCon China 2013 are held separately in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhuhai (
8th December) and Beijing (14th December). It is pretty rare to
see the PyCon Conference held in different cities separately in one
country, but very reasonable for a country like China who has such a
wide land.
PyCon
China trip
Yusei
Tahara, who has participated in PyCon Japan and PyCon United States
has been a Pythoner for 10 years as his daily work has a very close
relation with Python. Nexedi has set up the the international
strategy of entering the Chinese Market, so I went to Shanghai to
assist Yusei for his speech.
Registration
I
found the event on Turing website where all the IT events are listed
each month. After getting in touch with the organizers, I proposed
them a series of topics created in Nexedi that relate to Python.
Finally, we both agreed on the topic “Python without file system”.
Yusei were going to give the speech on behalf of Nexedi. We decided
to attend the rehearsal on Saturday afternoon.
Headed
to Shanghai
I
left Paris on Thursday and planned to meet Yusei in Shanghai on
Friday. In real, because of the thick fog and terrible PM2.5 in
Shanghai, both our planes delayed. I spent six hours in the airport
Charles De Gaulle, and he waited 2 hours more for boarding in Japan.
It was not a very smooth beginning, but didn't influence our passion
for Pycon China. When we arrived in Shanghai ,we can smelled the
difference in the air which was not very pleasant at all.
Rehearsal
on Saturday
The
rehearsal was held in the conference room of AutoDesk located in
Pudong which was sponsored by Google. In order to improve the
quality of the presentation for the next day, 13 people including
part of speakers and organizers attended the rehearsal. Speakers
presented their speeches and presentations one by one, so as to get
advices from audiences on the content, as well as to control the
time. Yusei's speech was generally good, just need to shorten the
information that was displayed on each slide. He did the modification
soon after.
The
rehearsal lasted from 13h30 to 18h. Every speaker got improvement on
their speech and we went to a nice Chinese restaurant to have the
welcoming dinner together. It was also organized by China Google
Developer Group.
Day
of the event
The
sign-in started at 8h30. Weather was pretty good except there's still
heavy fog, from the building, we could hardly see clearly the
outside.
Organizers
were very busy with the preparation, the venue was taken place in the
a conference hall ( about 200 seats) of Pudong Software Park. The
symbol of Pycon changed from snakes to dragons, which is a very
admirable symbol in China. All the speakers received dark blue caps
with the symbol on it and audiences received one as gifts.
Finally
started
With
the announcement by Sting Chen, who is the leader of organizers, the
Pycon China 2013 Shanghai finally began.
Video
letter from the author of Leo
Edward
K. Ream's, who is the author of Leo, sent a video letter to Chinese
Pythoners, which was shown at the beginning of the conference. Leo is
an editor tool which was developed 13 years ago, based on Python
platform that possesses an unique world view. Leo, similar to Emacs,
provides self – expanding function. Even though Yusei had never
used Leo, but he found it would be very interesting to try this
unique way of thinking.
System
design DAE
DAE
is a system foundation of Douban, a leading SNS in China. Hong
Qiangning, the CTO of Douban explained that DAE (Douban Adorable
Engine) is a system that present value visibility to end users.
Currently, there are 427 applications includes 126 external apps,
dealing with 2.4 billion dynamic requests each day on 32 nodes. Using
DAE, helps the code separation, re-using fundamental infrastructure
such as MySQL & BeansDB, as well as simplifying the new project
implementation.
Celery
distributed design
Celery
is introduced by Ye Jianye, the CTO of Glow Inc, who has been using
Python for 4 years on web/mobile server development and data
analysis. Glow use Celery for tasks such as sending push
notifications, emails and so on. It works as the following work flow:
Producer sends a task to the Broker; Broker sends it to task queue
according to the category; there is at least one worker in each task
queue to execute new task and delete old task. By using the celery,
they can reduce the reaction time of server, isolate the heavy task
into a individual server (avoiding influence on other process), as
well as execute a series of code at a reserved time. Currently, the
Brokers that Celery supported are RabbitMQ and Redis, others like
MongoDB, AmazonSQS,ect are still in the experimental phase.
Lunch
break
The
morning session ended up, Subway sandwiches and mineral drinks were
distributed free of charge to all participants for lunch. We had our
lunch and took a little rest in the room which was particularly
prepared for speakers. We had a some discussions with other speakers
and returned back to the big hall.
In
the afternoon, the event was divided into two parts: one was
for the
rest speeches,
the other was
called Codelab which was
about tutorial of OpenStack and Open ERP. The participants were able
to write actual code on their own computers along with the
instructors.
The
afternoon session
Python
community's latest report: “Open source and I”
KJ,
a key member of the GDG China and Hsiaoming Yang, the creator of
Python Community China site announced the latest news and statement
of this community. Even he is the most active member in China Github,
because of his “Otaku character”, the community is not very
well-known. He announced that he would try to be more sociable to
attract more pythoners to the community and create high - quality
contents in Chinese together.
Python
without file system
It
was the presentation given by Yusei. He introduced the mechanism of
sharing the latest code across clusters automatically by saving the
code in database in stead of writing python code in the file system.
This mechanism is developed recently in ERP5, an open source ERP
based on Python. He was also involved in the development team. By
using this mechanism, deploying the latest code becomes easier than
before.
Yusei
answered a couple of questions at the end of his speech. As english
is the basic for programmers, there's no difficulties for the
audiences to understand his speech. However, it was still hard for
them to speak fluently comparing \ with their skills in writing,
reading and listening.
Learning
python with Weixin --- Crossin's programming classroom
It
was about a Python learning system developed by Yuan Xin (Crossin).
He is using Django, Restricted Python and JQuery Mobile to develop
this learning system on Weixin platform with the Official Account's
name: “Crossin's programming classroom” for people who start
learning programming for the first time. What was interesting of this
talk was that this idea came from a “beautiful girl” who wanted
to learn Python, which motivated him to develop such a system to
deliver python education to the public.
Public
cloud architecture based on Python
Introduction
of services of using Python in the public cloud by Zheng Ke from
SpeedyCloud. The announcement was made by analogy to the cloud system
of popular video game StarCraft2.
How
to develop an interview assessment system in 2 days
The
speech was given by Lv Zhaogang, Duan Huajie, who both come from Da
Zhong Dianping (a city-life
consuming Guide site). They
introduced how to develop an interview assessment system in 2 days in
order to simplify the work of HR and reducing the number of files
used by them. The system was
built by using the Django web framework of Python.
A
breath of fresh air Renaissance in Python created by “Sedimentary
sugar”
“Sedimentary
sugar”(Dui Tang) was created by Cao Wenjiong and two other
developers in 2010. It is a community operating site based on Python,
as well as Java. The flow has increased 40 times after 3 years
operation. From this case, you can feel that the power of “Shanghai
Silicon Valleyi” is booming.
Continuous
integration that uses a Buildbot, Git and Docker
The
last one was talking about the construction of continuous integration
system using Buildbot, Git and Docker by Adieu's that was created by
the speaker recently. Git is well-know from the result of the field
survey, however, Docker and Buildbot are lack of popularity.
Continuous Integration is a concept that is currently attracting
attention, but it did not seem widely known yet in China.
Ending
and lottery
Lottery
was held to end up the PyCon China 2013. Winners are chosed by a
lottery system, and the gifts were Python books. There are plenty of
winners and a decent number of presents were given out.
In
the end,
KJ and Sting delivered the ending speech. In the evening, some
audiences joined for the gather-togather buffet for further
discussion.
End
of the trip
This
is our first participation in Pycon China. The organizers and
participants were very friendly and it was a pleasant experience.
Most of the speakers started using Python around five years ago,
however, we realize that the open source platform such as Python are
becoming widely used at an amazing speed.
The
speakers of Pycon China each year are basically the same, there are
very few foreign speakers, we hope that there are more speakers join
us and present their ideas about Python next year.