Earlier this month our engineering team had the opportunity to attend PyCon, which is the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language that Peloton’s backend happens to be built on. Not only was it a great way to educate the engineering community about some of the technical challenges Peloton currently faces and find some new recruits, but it was a great learning experience for our team! We checked in with a group of our tech pros to get a little more insight on their take aways from the trip.
“PyCon was a chance to see a wide spectrum of Python usage, interests, and passion. I attended tutorials on using machine learning to extract data from text, on building applications with a popular framework and using advanced Python techniques. Various venues showed the culture of the Python community, beyond Guido Van Rossum’s nostalgic keynote, or Larry Hasting’s, technical, but nonetheless emotional “GILectomy”; groups of people, as well as individuals, sitting against the walls, laptops in laps, lunch-time conversations amongst strangers who just met at their table. All in all, it was a mash-up of an industry-style conference with booths, and an academic-style conference of like-minded researchers.”
-Sid, Senior Software Engineer
“I learned a lot from the talks at PyCon. For instance, how to have Python functions call Go functions and vice versa. We have plans to bring Go into our mostly Python stack and that was great information. Also, Peloton as an engineering organization has been talking about contributing back to the open source community. I was very glad to see that it got kick started during PyCon. Adam and David from our team used the sprint days at the tail end of Pycon to release peloton bloomfilters, which is a shared memory bloomfilter implementation. We’re looking forward to contributing even more to the open source community!”
-Ben, Senior Engineering Manager
“This year’s PyCon in Portland taught me a lot about high-performance applications. One thing that surprised me was how many people were dropping into C-code in order to solve performance problems. The talk on writing safe C extensions gave some practical guidelines for different types of references. At the sprint, we worked on making a high-performance C-based bloomfilter using some of the ideas presented here. Not only was there a lot of information about low-level code, but also high-level system design patterns. One interesting pattern in the talk about service failure was the circuit-breaker pattern to handle failures for remote calls. Overall, I was very motivated and excited to have the opportunity to engage with the Python community this way!”
-Dave, Software Engineer
“Listening to the keynote of Guido Van Rossum was like listening to the words of God – It was probably the highlight of my experience. I felt thrilled every moment of it. I also loved the Portland area – The food was great, but of course not as good as New York!”
-Aoshi, Software Engineer
“PyCon is a great conference that annually inspires the community to find more to love about the language. It was a great opportunity for me to broaden my Python knowledge and I got to learn some new tech that I currently don’t use, some new tech that I could actually start using in my day to day and I also got the opportunity to dive deeper into some of my current knowledge, like a dive into how Gevent works. I actually got to meet up with a family – two sisters and one brother, who came to PyCon! The brother had just finished high school actually so it was exciting to see more people joining the Python community, even at a young age.”
-Xu, Software Engineer
“The tutorials were really helpful, they were hands-on and informative. As a mobile developer, I learned a lot about the language that I don’t use everyday. There are some very interesting talks about projects using Raspberry Pi and Python to build awesome gadgets. I also learned more about network security from the talks. I liked the lightening talks the most; they’re each really short, but to the point, with a lot of exciting live demos. Talking to the engineers that came to the Peloton booth during the conference was also beneficial, to get our brand name out and gathering some interesting feedback.
-Yu Ji, Mobile Engineer
Interested in more tech talk? Click here to read more from our Peloton Engineering team here.