PyCon First Timer

It's been an interesting run since the pandemic started.  Hard to convince myself that large in person meetups are worth it, but PyCon was actually quite easy to dive into.  

My fellow attendees and the staff were helpful and full of pride for being there, creating an atmosphere full of acceptance and excitement.  I even signed up for a few volunteer shifts at the registration desk thanks to how good I felt.  

I'll get into specific talks I attended next week, but I'm still riding the high from the conference even now two weeks later.

PyCon US 2025

I attended PyCon in Pittsburgh PA this past week and it was a great time. Beyond all the great talks and speakers there was a huge sense of community that I came across the entire weekend. 

Comparing to other conferences I have attended PyCon really sticks out.  Every conversation I got to have over lunch or in the hallway was uplifting and really showcased the diversity of the language and the people using it.  

I also had a few "celebrity" encounters, breakfast with Bruce Eckel, a nice chat with Al Sweigart over OCR packages, and even got to say hello to Dawn Gibson-Wages and talk current state of the industry.

My next few posts will be about the conference in greater detail.

Type this: Data

Learning about abstract data types right now in class.  I'll admit with our government now openly kidnapping citizens to send to death camps in foreign countries makes everything seem silly.  Yet I continue with the learning journey I've always been on.

This course is a great introduction to ADTs and their uses. I'm looking forward to using it in my projects going forward. 

Deconstructed recursion

The last two weeks of assignments in my classes have been about recursion.  This week for our assignment we had to rewrite a linked list class so that each method used recursion.  

Adding and Removing made the most sense.  It was easy to find the bad cases and then call the method again.  I used a helper function for each method, made it easier to comply with other parameters from the assignment.

I'm still confused on the formatting of some things.  I had used a few else statements after the if statement that was funding the base case, but had to remove most as it was causing an endless loop.  

I also had to rewrite the reverse method a few times until I remembered to include a temporary counting variable.  Will have to find more leet code problems to test myself going forward.

Parallel Problems

I've been working on a chess idea for the AT Proto, and now it turns out my final project for my Intro to CS class is to build a chess variant program.   

On the plus side I inadvertently designed at least one part of my program a month before my class even began, but it also means I need to redirect some energy into rethinking how I am gonna structure the game.  

Should be fun