On 12/09/2016 04:35 PM, Jeff Sandys wrote:
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.
Awesome, sounds like SeaGL was a success this year. Glad to hear that
there was a strong presence of the Fedora <3 Python campaign there!
Thanks for helping organize the Fedora presence there.
When you mention the hands-on challenge, what did you have in mind? Like
a quiz about Python programming concepts, or were you thinking of
something else? Maybe a game? I'm trying to get a better idea of what
you had in mind, as I might have a few ideas.
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com