YuviSense Codin Kid

Warning: Rambling, unedited, 7 month old recollection ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

Ah, PyCon India 2009. My first solo bit of travel outside Chennai. What fun it was :) Though it was almost 7 months ago, most of the memories are still fresh. Compare that to college, where I struggle to remember what happened last week...

Anyway, it was fun. I went off by bus with the rather interesting Anirudh - a profitable startupeer and someone I met when working with Busroutes.in. He has a finances related degree and his startup deals with (rather cool) car electronics. He was also a KDE contributor, and is a very interesting travel partner for reasons too numerous to mention here.

I spent some time at Lalbagh, roaming around by myself (and texting classmates with my legs hanging off a cliff-type place). Was fun! I'd definitely do that again - the place was extremely peaceful.

I stayed at Sudar's place. Staying at a bachelor's place was fun - guess that was how my room would look like if I was left all to myself. It was, however, definitely too organized for my tastes - you could actually walk without accidentally stepping on stuff ;) He's grown up too fast - he actually dragged me to a food place and forced me to have breakfast!

Hung around mostly with mech-yet-wannabe-geek Kausik (who once famously said that he 'doesn't want to use LaTeX for resumes because most people ask for docx or pdf'), Anirudh and Sudar (who was there only for Day 1). Had a longish talk with Kenneth, who I later found out was quite a celebrity on IRC/Mailing Lists. Meeting people you knew onlyine online IRL is unsettling at first.

The event itself went well. I was inside only for a couple of major talks - the one about waffle by cnu is the only thing I could remember. I was mostly out in the corridors, typing out code in (one of the many) laptops that Sudar has. The lightning talks were way more fun - because they were only 15 mins or so long and packed a lot of tech (I particularly remember the one about Python internals by artagnon and one about a GAE app by ideamonk. I gave one too - the last one, so I had no projector, no working laptop, no mic, oh and Kausik who was supposed to present with me ditched me in the last minute :P It still went exceedingly well - it was my first time ever talking on a stage of any stage outside college and the practice I had from giving them in college (Thanks to Dorai and the iCell) helped a ton. I even cracked quite a few jokes that was recieved well. Fun times - and I guess it finally killed the last remaining bits of my 'shit, you aren't really expecting me to go up there and talk, are you?' feelings developed from school days :)

Before I left, I visited planemad at NID. Awesome place. Someday, I hope someone established a National Institude of Programming at such a scenic place, where people can come together and learn about programming rather than engineering (which is just college-management-speak for IT Industry Zombie Production Factory)

There you go! That's a rambling account of my PyCon India 2009 experiences. Next one is probably going to be in Chennai - looking forward to that!

We had a python workshop at college a week back.

One hellova workshop it was! Kausik conducted it, and about 14 people turned up (We picked 15, one girl had to miss it 'coz of fever). Every single one of them was there because they wanted to be there. This happened during semester holidays, so they came to college just for this. And from the feedback (and the actions that followed it) I got, it was worth their while.

Teaching Python

Kausik did all the hard work, with me just going around helping people get unstuck. Watching people when they suddenly get it is a really amazing feeling.

The hardest part for many people was not the significant whitespace (most intuitively got it, we didn't even have to repeat it once). It was the concept of explicit self. And the biggest (though not exhaustive) selling points were, in no particular order: Lack of the semicolon, no boilerplate code (type declarations, etc) and support for arbritarily large numbers. pointers are conspicous by their absence.

So, what did you guys cover?

Day 1

• "Hello World!"
• Conditionals, Looping constructs
• Functions
• Lists, Dictionaries and Tuples
• Basics of OOP (Classes, Objects, and explicit self)

Day 2

• Using Google to find docs
• The datetime module
• Using easy_install to install external libraries
• Exploring docs of python-dateutil module

Pretty much zero time was spent lecturing, and most time was spent actually doing things. Just as how things should have been :)

Following up

The best thing about this workshop was it did not end at closing time Day 2. It went on. We are now planning on a weekly programming competition at college, with cash prizes (sponsored by the college and Mr. Dorai Thodla). And several people have taken up solving problems on Project Euler, and we have a working game done by one of the students. That isn't the end - one team is hoping to replace the antiquated VB6-ish management system in our library with one built in django, while another is trying to automate attendence systems using SMS.

Inspiration

So, how did it all get started? The inspiration? Hackfest. Huge thanks to vimzard, kstar and the rest of the Hackfest team who were our inspiration. I hope there is a Hackfest next year too, and that some (a lot!) of our students are more than good enough to attend and make meaningful contributions. It changed me this year, and it should continue to shape and change more people throughout the years :)

And ofcourse, no small thanks to Dorai Thodla, who helped get this entire iCell thing off the ground, and Ms. Sumathi Poobal & Mr. Ramanayagam from our college, without whose participation the iCell would've died a silent death. (What's this iCell thingy anyway? A post for some other time :) )

I didn't happen to forget someone whose name began with a K, did I?

I'm going to PyCon India 2009. Are you?