The Seattle GNU/Linux conference, SeaGL, intentionally attracts a variety
of attendees, students from Seattle Central College, local Linux
enthusiasts, curious neighbors, and programmers from big software
companies, indies and start-ups. About 500 people attended the exhibits and
talks on the two days. The exhibit area was closed for the keynotes so I
saw Corey Quinn tell us the Art of Personal Failure and Allison Randal
presented Free as in Freedom. Bill Wright received the Cascadia Community
Builder Award for his efforts building LinuxFest NorthWest.
With Laura Abbott and John Dulaney, we staffed a table featuring Fedora
loves Python. We showed Pippy, the Python learning environment on the One
Laptop Per Child, and a Raspberry PI 3 running Fedora 25 with
beefy-connection, a Python Flask application created by Scott Williams. The
RPI arrived the day before the conference, Fedora 25 was easy to install,
John Dulaney got beefy-connection (a kiosk to connect with guests) running
smoothly, then he installed Xonsh to show me a Python shell.
We talked to guests about Python and Fedora, many were just learning Python
and many were experienced users. I asked guests, ‘What IDE do you use?’ One
guest, a web developer, said a multi-line editor (Sublime?) that we talked
about. Then they had some technical questions. I’m thankful that Laura
Abbott answered her questions and many others. I ran Jupyter with some of
Peter Norvig’s notebooks open, like the Monty Hall probability simulation
and Regex Golf problems. Peter Norvig is such an elegant programmer, his
notebooks are fun to discuss. And the drawings for the Fedora Loves Python
tee-shirts were popular.
At Flock I gave a presentation, Spin Your Exhibit, and applied those ideas
to the Fedora Loves Python theme. We showed tools for beginner,
experienced, and specialized users by talking about IDEs. The OLPC always
attracts guests and is a story of Python success. Swag included the Fedora
Loves Python trifold, cool buttons and Tee-shirts. Specialized hardware was
the Raspberry PI. But I didn’t have a hands on challenge. What sort of
quick and easy Python challenge could you set up? I thought of a list
comprehension quiz, what ideas do you have? Beefy-connection was hands on
but not very challenging or memorable.
This is the fourth year for SeaGL and it is growing. Exhibiting is great to
make new friends and discuss new ideas. I met the organizer for Puppy
(Puget Sound Programming Python) meet-up and will attend with some swag.
Talked to Bill Wright about LinuxFest NorthWest (May 6 & 7, 2017), I want
to add a QRcode reader to beefy-connection. The Free Software Foundation
invited members to a Friday night meet up, our table discussed rights and
freedom between web frameworks and tug boats. Thanks to Fedora for
sponsoring this exhibit.