Top 10 Sessions at PyCon 2018

PyCon has a very nice history of releasing videos of all of their sessions in a very timely manner. Although, it's up to me to actually have time to watch them.

Now that I've gone through several videos I wanted to share the top ten of them that I think will give the most to people who are interested in which sessions they should watch.

Python 2 to 3: How to Upgrade and What Features to Start Using by Trey Hunner

With the announcement of Python 2 coming to a complete end in the very beginning of 2020, it's a good idea to start thinking of how to upgrade your existing Python 2 code to Python 3. Trey gives a great talk on ways you can start upgrading and the best features of Python 3 you can start using.

You're an expert. Here's how to teach like one by Shannon Turner

Shannon goes through some nice tips on how to better teach programming. These tips, I believe, also can help you give better presentations, as well.

Building a cross-platform native app with BeeWare by Russell Keith-Magee

This was a cool one to watch. Using BeeWare we were able to see Russell show how to create, not only desktop applications, but mobile applications. This is pretty big because Python isn't known for creating mobile applications, but now that we have BeeWare perhaps it's time that it is.

Oops! I Committed My Password To GitHub by Miguel Grinberg

I'm sure we've all encountered or, at least, worried about our credentials and API keys getting checked into GitHub for all to see. Miguel talks about how to resolve it if it does happen and also goes into ways to prevent it from happening again.

Elegant Solutions For Everyday Python Problems by Nina Zakharenko

In this talk, Nina goes over several interesting Python tricks that you could use to up your Python game. Such solutions that she provides are:

• Named tuples
• Decorators
• Context managers

Using Python to build an AI to play and win SNES StreetFighter II by Adam Fletcher and Jonathan Mortensen

This was a fun one to watch. Adam and Jonathan go into how they used StreetFighter II for reinforcement learning. They detail how they coded it and what they found when they first started letting the AI play the game.

The Journey Over the Intermediate Gap by Sara Packman

I'm sure we've all had some imposter syndrome at some point. Having that can hinder improving ourselves as developers. Sara goes over what she did to get out of the pleateau of stagnating at an intermediate level and offers tips on how we can do the same.

Learning From Failure: Post Mortems by Alex Gaynor

You often learn best from failure. In this talk Alex goes over that failure happens and you have to learn from it. He then goes into that one of the best ways to do that is by writting a post mortem of the project which can serve as documentation and allow others who weren't part of the project learn from it as well.

Dataclasses: The code generator to end all code generators by Raymond Hettinger

New in Python 3.7, data classes are a new way to build, well, data classes. In this talk Raymond goes over what you get when you use a data class, compares it to named tuples, and offers an example of using data classes.

Bayesian Non-parametric Models for Data Science using PyMC3 by Christopher Fonnesbeck

In this talk Christopher goes over PyMC3, a packge to build Bayesian statistical models, and how to use it to build non-parametric, or parameters that scale with your data, models.

10 Sites Where You Can Get Programming Practice

Watching and reading programming tutorials are great! They give a curated view of a concept or new technology that may take hours longer to understand than going at it alone. However, much like math, programming is not a spectator sport. You need to practice in order to better understand the programming concept or technology in a real program.

There are a lot of ways one can do this, though, without having to fully set up an environment for each language or framework you want to learn.

Here are 10 sites that you can use to start learning new languages and other programming concepts.

Code Wars

Code Wars profile view.

This is one of my favorite sites to go to, especially when I want some practice with a new language. They have most of the common languages already supported with a few more in beta so most likely you can get some practice in here.

All of the "katas", as they call the challenges, have always been challenging for me. Plus seeing other people's solutions I'm sure to learn something new.

Hacker Rank

Hacker Rank is another code challenge site, but a tad bit different. They also have competitions throughout the year where you can participate and see how you rank among other competitors. I've also seen some companies use this site as a first pass for interviewing candidates.

The nice thing about this site is that it pretty much emphasizes algorithms and data structures, which I consider two things that you could get the most out of if you practice it.

Top Coder

TopCoder compete login page.

TopCoder is similar to HackerRank, but you can actually get paid for the challenges you compete in. This is a good way to see how you compare with other developers in the challenges and to challenge yourself to get better at certain types of programming, such as data structures, math, and string manipulations.

Kaggle

Kaggle is more suited for data scientists, but it's a place where you can find data to play around with. They also host their own competitions that can pay out.

You don't need to use this for data science, though. Since they offer a lot of data sets you can use them in for other applications as well. Want to create a web app with some of the data? Go for it!

Project Euler

Project Euler is probably one of the first sites with programming challenges and puzzles. This site is composed of mathematical problems that you can solve in code and the further you go the harder the math problems.

Rosalind

Very similar to Project Euler, Rosalind gives challenges in regards to problems in bioinformatics. These challenges may be considsered a bit better since they solve more real world problems than just arbitrary math problems in Project Euler.

Screeps

This is a fun one, especially if you are really interested in game programming. This site gives you the opportunity to code exercises as part of a Real Time Strategy game with JavaScript. Game programming is a totally different beast than doing web sites or any other business applications as it's a different way of thinking and experience that goes with it. This is especially great to get started with some game programming when you don't necessarily have a project of your own to work on.

CodeChef

CodeChef is similar to TopCoder where they host several competitions and you can get paid for completing them. CodeChef holds those competitions monthly so you'll always have a chance to see how you stand against other programmers. There are definitely plenty of problems to practice before going into a competition and they are all ranked from easy to hard.

CodingGame

CodinGame is fairly similar to how Code Wars works, but the challenges are a bit more of a game. They are more turn based so with each "turn" you get new input and you must give new output based off of it. Similar to Screeps above, the challenges are like mini games you help code. When you run your test cases you can see your code in action as the game is being played, so you get some instant, and visual, feedback to how your code performs.

Up For Grabs

Ok, so this isn't much of an exercise site, but I feel that it's important enough to mention in this post. Why? Working on open source projects is one of the best things you can do as a developer, and this site helps make it easy. A lot of projects have been creating an "up-for-grabs" label on GitHub to let newer contributors get into their projects a lot easier by fixing easier bugs. Doing these will help you become a regular contributor to the project which will have more real world experience than doing other algorithmic or mathematical exercises.