Pycon on Blog | Jonas Neubert

The PyCon Speaker Experience (is phenomenal)

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The PyCon 2018 website is up and the January 3rd deadline for talk proposals is approaching steadily. Could there be a better time than this to reflect on my experience as a first-time speaker at PyCon 2017 and maybe encourage someone else to be a first-time speaker in 2018?

I’m not a seasoned public speaker by any measure, but I have talked in front of audiences while waving my arms at slideshows a hand-full of times, and somewhat regularly go to events where others do the same. I’ve also been humbled by how hard it is to stage even a small speaking event while co-organizing Ignite Ithaca.

PyCon 2017 Talk

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The PyCon talk which I’ve been preparing for with steadily increasing stress levels since February happened three weeks ago at PyCon 2017 in Portland. Time to post a quick retrospective!

The recording of the talk is up on Youtube. Huge props to the PyCon organizers for posting all talk recordings publicly every year. This year the videos were up less than 24 hours after the talk!

I also put together Github Gist with links and notes to go along with the talk, and the slide deck is up on Speakerdeck (although the slide deck only covers what was on screen for half of the talk, the other half consisting of the demo).

PyCon Talk Progress Update: Hindsight is 80/20

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The high level update on my PyCon talk prep is that I’m currently making the transition from making steady deliberate progress to a more panic-driven hair-on-fire style of working. Three weeks from today this thing better works–on stage, and in Portland.

On a more technical level, the status is that I have a working prototype of my demo and am confident that I can construct a good talk narrative around it. Here’s what the prototype currently looks like (cat for scale):

PyCon Talk Progress Update: What needs to be in a Robotics Demo?

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a month since my factory automation talk got accepted into PyCon. If you’ve been following along by means of this blog you’ve seen that I bought a barcode reader on Ebay, made an adapter for it and wasted some time figuring out how to do Serial-to-USB on a Mac.

Barcode readers are cool stuff, but when you promised a factory automation demo, reading a few barcodes doesn’t really cut it. The same goes for a lot of other automation equipment like pushers, shakers, label printers and so on: It might technically be factory automation, but nobody comes to PyCon to see tech that contains fewer transistors than the blender in their kitchen at home.

Intro to Barcode Readers

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you read last week’s blog post you already know that I’ve got three months to put together a physical demo for a PyCon talk about factory automation. This post is the first in a series of progress updates.

In robotics and automation, the smallest realistic demo has three parts: Sensing, control, and actuation. I spent Week 1 selecting and bargain hunting for an industrial barcode reader to cover the sensing part of the demo. As I went along I wrote up my notes as an “Introduction to Barcode Readers”; if you only want to know what I ended up buying, scroll down to the end!

Tap, Tap, Tap

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

… is this thing still on?

Besides that Tumblr blog where I collect factory flicks on a NSFW domain, I haven’t produced much written content for public consumption over the past three years. Looks like they even shut down Google Reader because this blog dried up!

But things are about to change! Here’s the plan:

My talk proposal for PyCon 2017 just got accepted (via a detour through the backup talks list). The title that my pressure prompted brain came up with a few hours before the submission deadline: