Watched a lot of great Python talks at PyDX this weekend. Here are some memorable ones:

• Portia Burton’s Talk on the Future of Cryptocurrency
• Servo Behind the Scene by E. Dunham (Mozilla): How to Automate Your DevOps with Bots
• “A Gentle Introduction to Python Performance” by Nathaniel Smith
• “Machine Learning for Absolute Beginners” by Hailey Buckingham
• “Moneyball.py” by Jeremy Tanner (from SendGrid)
• “Adding Celery to your Salad” by Hannes Hapke
• “Wayback Machine” by Barbara Miller

And my talk…

• There’s Hope for Chatbots

My talk was a big disappointment for me and some in the audience because I couldn’t get the Django interface to hope working. The talk is more of an overview of current chatbot tech rather than a HOWTO. But Cole’s LSTM-brained bot trained on movie dialog was a nice highlight and conclusion for the talk.

There’s a double reversal on Chatterbot’s repsonse.in_response_to self relationship for the Statement(Model) through Response(Model) asymmetrical relation. And something’s going on in the DjangoStorage plugin that sort-of untangles it, but I wasn’t able to unmigrate all my training data etc. Cowboy coding fail again. Gotta start writing tests first. Will get it going soon.

Slides and videos will be online soon at PyDX, I’m sure. So check back for more links.

Rami and I had a few questions for Nathan but didn’t want to ask publicly… so how about an unread blog post about it ;)

• sets are dicts without values, only keys
• I don’t think you can depend on any sort order for sets
• appending to

One thing that I learned was that you can append tuples like

>>> tuple('ABC') + tuple('DEF')
('A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F')