SciPy Conference

I'm back from my first ever trip to SciPy, the annual scientific Python community conference. I found it quite amazingly good.

https://conference.scipy.org/scipy2014/site_media/static/img/scipy2014_logo_simple.png

Slides from my talk on Wednesday are at https://sgillies.github.io/scipy-2014-rasterio/. I feel like it went well and hope that you found (and will find it) useful, too. I missed Tuesday's sessions, which were jam packed with geospatial talks, and didn't have time to check out all the slides from those before presenting. Referencing other talks is something I usually try to do, and failing to do so felt a little weird. My talk was sandwiched between Tyler Erickson's on Google Earth Engine and Shawn Walbridge's on workflows and distribution of GIS Science toolkits; a nice showing of research and science going on at Google, Mapbox, and Esri.

The IPython Notebook seemed to be the major touchstone for presenters and other attendees of the conference, and rightly so. I've got all kinds of plans for doing things with it, many that I expressed at the conference, and I'm certain that it's going to spread in GIS circles. Features coming soon to notebooks near you include: map interactivity, Native Client notebooks, Google Drive hosted notebooks, and a new language agnostic platform. I enjoyed getting to meet Fernando Perez and Brian Granger and congratulate them on the success of the project.

Greg Wilson's keynote, available on Youtube, was a challenge to apply science to the teaching of programming and other subjects. I definitely recommend watching it. A strange recommendation from me, I know, since I'm more likely to say things like "keynotes are terrible." Keynotes that stroke the audience are terrible. Wilson's is better than that.

Best part of the trip for me was sprinting on GeoPandas and other projects with Kelsey Jordahl, Nora Deram, Jacob Wasserman (remotely), Matt Perry, Taylor Oshan, Carson Farmer, Shawn Walbridge, Serge Ray, and Philip Stephens. I learned a ton about Pandas and GeoPandas, made some solid contributions to the project, and all in great company. It was a pleasure and a privilege.

One sobering thing is being reminded that not everyone enjoys the same pleasure and privilege. It's important to read and think about April Wright's thoughts on SciPy: http://wrightaprilm.github.io/posts/lonely.html.