LinkedIn at PyCon 2014

This year, LinkedIn sponsored PyCon 2014, and thirty of us went up to the beautiful city of Montreal, Quebec.

PyCon is my favorite software conference, hands down. It's a wonderful mix of people from all over the world, from hardcode software engineers to data scientists to educators. The organizers of PyCon are dedicated to making PyCon accessible to everyone, so you get a much broader range of attendees than you do at other conferences.

And Montreal is now on my list of favorite cities. We were in the beautiful old section, with cobblestone streets and stone buildings. The weather even cooporated for the most part - us spoiled Californians didn't have to bundle up too much.

At the conference, LinkedIn had a huge booth in the exhibit floor, where we gave away snake puzzles and t-shirts. Our recruiters Take and Kiran ran the show, but us engineers helped pitch in. It's always fun to hear what people are doing and looking for.

The most common question we got (ok, other than "are you hiring?") was "What does LinkedIn use Python for?" Answer: plenty! All our internal infrastructure is built in Python: deployment, monitoring, performance, and all of our internal sites are Python. And that's not even getting into the data scientists and big data crowd, which use it for data analysis and aggregation.

On Saturday, I gave a talk on Developing Flask Extensions. Flask is a Python microframework which we use extensively in-house to develop web applications. Last year, I wrote and open-sourced a small extension to support internal A/B testing, and I used it as a working example of how to write an extension.

Congrats to the PyCon leadership for another fantastic conference, and thanks to Montreal for being such great hosts. We hope to see you at Pycon 2015 next year!