PyCon Day 3: Greg Stein Keynote

The keynote this morning was given by Greg Stein. Audio/video of his talk should be available at some point, but his slides are not available for download. Because of that I took extensive notes in Tomboy, which should be about as close to the slides as I could get with bad eyesight a the back of the room:

GregSteinKeynote

Notes taken during the Friday keynote at PyCon.

Note before the keynote: Python success stories: pythonology.org.

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Quote by Peter about python. [[sorry, the text was too small for me –Ed. ]]

Python 10 years ago, contributed to Python, authored some modules and apps. Open source, contributed (c and python). Current chairman of ASF. viewcvs.py. Subversion, Apache httpd.

“We consider Python to be our secret sauce.” –Paul Everett

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Python at eShop:
1995 “What in the world is python?”
1996 “this is great stuff”

[[eShop gets assimilated. –Ed.]]

Python at Microsoft:
1996 “it’s called what?”
1997 “You actually shipped Python code?”
1998 “Nice prototype. We’ll rewrite it in the next version.”

Python at CollabNet:
2001 “No we don’t really use Python here”
2003 “Definitely write that in Python”

Python at Google:
2004 “Of course we use Python. Why wouldn’t we?”

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Small companies eventually “got it” ahread of the curve
– Champion was needed

Larger companies follow Python’s growth curve
– Supporting environment was needed

Python had to grow for it to becoming business acceptable
– Large enough talent pool
– Support services
– Books
– Consulting
– World wide web
– Follow the trail-blazers

Python passed the tipping point years ago.

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Highly adaptable
– Changing requirements
– Changes in computing environment

Rapid Development
– For new and experienced developers

Easy to maintain

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Primary languages
– C++
– Java
– Python

Miscellaneous
– Some perl used by Operations
– PHP creeps in for internal webapps
– Saw Ruby sneaking around
– Small amount of C#

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SWIG: Simplified Wrapper Interface Generator
– www.swig.org
– Started by David Beazley

Multi-language Environment
– SWIG pulls these “islands” together
– Very fast mechanism for integration

Integrated into build system

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Where do we use it?

– Across our internal network
– Across a system lifecycle
– Live services

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Basic network

development cloud to infrastructure to a whole bunch of servers. “we have quite a few servers”

In development build system
– wrappers for version control (they use Perforce). No, you don’t really understand Java code. Forces code reviews. Sends mail out.
– build system (written in Python)
– Packaging. Bundles of data packaged up and sent to servers. All built on Python. 3rd generation, it’s a complex problem on a gigantic scale.

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Some usage in the network infrastructure
– Binary data publisher
– package repository

This is written in Python too of course. Push it out. They keep increasing the scale of the problem.

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Some usage on production servers
– Monitoring (health, temp, hardware, etc)
– Auto-restart

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Complete the Lifecycle
Log reporting
– We generate a “large” amount of log information
– Data is pulled back from the servers
– Analyzed using lots of Python tools
– Easy to alter the reports based on ever-changing needs

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Python-based services

Google groups
– “Python old-timers” Jeske and Long (of eGroups and ClearSilver)

code.google.com
– Stein and DiBona

Others? We have so much going on..

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How code.google.com was built:
front end stuff on top
code.google.com server
SWIG
google stuff on bottom

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code.google.com

goopy package
– Functional stuff to start with
– Place to put future modules

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Closing
We have lots of Python code covering a broad range of needs

Python has helped Google for many, many years

SWIG is underrated

We are now starting to open-source some of the code.