PyCon Malaysia 2018

PyCon Malaysia 2018 was held on 25th and 26th August and it was my first experience attending a technical conference. As a first-timer as a participant, I had arrived with zero expectations and was happy to leave the conference with a better exposure of what actually goes on in a tech conference.

For the first day of the 2-days conference, I was mostly behind Xoxzo's booth and meeting participants. It was interesting to meet and speak to participants and share with them about Xoxzo as a company as well as to learn about types of projects that people in the community are involved in. For example, one participant was interested to know if he is able to send out SMS / call notifications for hardware downtime.

The keynote speaker on the first day was Khairil Yusof and in his talk he gave an insight of his work as Programme Consultant of Sinar Project and how he uses open data to gain a better insight of current political situations in the country.

Josef gave his talk on the first day, titled "How I Made My (mostly) Python Trainings Scale". He also gave a demo on how to use Jupyter notebook which he had used in his previous trainings with a crowd of approximately 120 people. He used Jupyter notebook in the trainings and it helped him to conduct the training with a larger crowd.

I had also participated in the lightning talk, sharing the usage of SShuttle package which easily creates a pseudo-VPN to be able to stay secure when connecting to public and unsecured WiFi connection. I briefly showed how to execute the SShuttle package and showed how easily the IP address of my machine had changed to reflect the server I had SSH into using SShuttle.

The keynote speaker on the second day was Yue Lin, the Director from Women Who Code Singapore. In this session, she emphasized on contributions to open source projects and spoke about her on-going project on dengue and malaria in Southeast Asia.

There were plenty of interesting talks in the conference, with a well balance areas of topics, from beginners to intermediate level, as well as Web development topics and Data Science. The conference ended on the second day with another round of Lightning Talks with one of them coming from the organizing team and Women Who Code KL with a very unique presentation (using sticky notes to illustrate their points!).