Episode: 2234
Title: HPR2234: linux.conf.au 2017: Richard Jones
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2234/hpr2234.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 16:17:23

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This is an HBR episode 2,234 entitled, Linux.com.0 2017, Richard Jones and is part of the series
Interview.
It is hosted by Clinton Roy and is about 37 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is 2 icon Australia organisers talk about icon 0 2017.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15 that's HBR15.
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All right so this is my second interview for Friday the final day of Linux.com for you and funnily enough,
it's a Python person. So joining me here is Richard Jones who is the lead organiser for Python AU 2016 2017.
Hi Clinton.
So you are here to spook Python AU as far as I'm concerned, so commence spooking.
Okay so so in fairness I should say that I was the lead organiser for Python AU for the previous two years when it was in Brisbane.
This year I sort of had a bit of a handover role like I was helping out with the conference as much as possible.
Sorry last year I had a bit of a handover role helping out with as many details as I could.
This year I'm very much planning on being a hands off role so Richard will, this conference will be his conference.
It won't be a sock pocket Clinton's conference.
No indeed and we're very very grateful for Clinton's help last year. It really did help us take over for our first year.
So Python Australia is the national Python programming conference.
The point of getting a bunch of Python professionals, enthusiasts, students and teachers all together to talk about all things Python and the ecosystem around Python.
For a few days in Melbourne in this case but we move around Australia.
We don't quite move around.
Maybe the next organiser will do that.
It's inspired by similar conferences that are run around the world.
I've lost count actually.
We're something in the order of 40 or 50 Python events around the world.
So you can ask this question of me as well.
But why are Python people at a lineage conference?
Apart from the spreeking opportunity of course.
There's a lot of crossover between Linux, Conf and PyCon.
Especially around, as I mentioned, that ecosystem, the world around Python.
There are people here who talk about Python and Python things.
But there's a lot also that goes on around that around open source and around community and community building.
And the various things that go around all software.
We talk about those at PyCon and they're being talked about here at Linux Conf.
Certainly in previous years there's been a number of talks on all of the jits.
So the new fancy runtimes that Python could be able to be run around.
I don't think I've seen any of those sort of talks this year.
But whether or not that's just because that activity is tightened down or the paper committee decided
they didn't want to go down that route, I'm not sure.
Well we certainly had talks from the micro Python angle,
which is an implementation of Python that runs on very small CPUs, microcontrollers.
So we had, and that's a whole new area for Python to be in.
It's kind of emerged in the last couple of years.
So that was a topic of quite a lot of talks and conversations.
And it certainly will be again this year.
And it's a topic here at Linux Conf as well.
Yeah.
I think I'm yet to actually play with microPython.
But it's certainly like one of the really,
like apart from technical aspects, one of the really interesting aspects was the crowd funding model
that the author used for that.
Yes.
So I think it was like an illegal go or kickstart or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He came up with proof of concepts for doing Python or one of these MMU bare boards.
And he put up a number of goals and he got funding that well exceeded his expectations.
And then he went back again for a second round to do some improvements and again smashed his goals for that.
And that's really been kind of the genesis of the whole microPython ecosystem that's come out now where
he initially that was to support a single single processor on a single board that he produced.
There have been as a couple of companies that are now producing independently producing boards.
Some of them are quite fancy boards involving multiple microcontrollers to do various hand off, hand off various tasks.
And the suite of microcontrollers that are supported by microPython is ever expanding,
including going into the FPGA space, which is like programmable silicon,
which has microPython then running on top of it.
Yeah.
And I think it's one of those things that is really nice being able to do embedded programming,
mostly be using Python, but still be able to do the picking and poking of the hardware items that you need.
But without having to go down into the sea layer and compile a blob just to do that one little component.
Absolutely.
And it's really exciting to see my daughter sitting in front of a terminal that is connected up to a bit of hardware,
which has LEDs plugged into it, and have her typing in code into the microcontroller,
which is being executed straight away to light up LEDs and to make pretty patterns.
That was really exciting to see.
Cool.
Cool.
So you've got a venue for the conference.
We do.
We're running in the same venue that we ran in 2016.
We'll be back at the Melbourne Convention Centre.
We have dates, a set.
We're running between August 3rd to 8th.
We've added on an extra day over last year, because we'll be running a day of dedicated tutorials on the very first day.
Before then, before we run the three days of actual program talks.
We'll be running the usual specialist track day that same as we ran last year.
It'll actually be the same topics as last year again.
So we'll be running an Education Seminar, the DjangoCon AU, Internet of Things, which was a huge hit last year.
That was newly added to the conference last year, and it was a huge hit.
So we'll be running that again.
And probably running some extra things around that that I can't talk about just yet.
Oh.
And...
Yes.
And the Science and Data MiniCon, which is always popular, because Python is immensely popular in the sciences and in data processing.
Yeah.
Okay, so you've got the dates.
You've got the venue.
Do you know approximately when you'll be opening up the call for papers?
Or is that a little bit too far?
We will be opening the call for papers approximately at the start of March.
Cool.
Cool.
All right.
So our audience is fairly international.
I imagine that you would expect that most of your speakers would be local, but certainly...
Do you have any sort of estimates on the number of international speakers that we had from last year?
I don't know.
So I think we had something on the order of 15 or so?
Okay.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah.
So I mean, we do...
It's one of those things where you're running a conference and I've...
Fortunately, the Prime Minister said this, so I'm okay with it.
But we're running a conference at the arson of the world, and it can often take a long time to get here.
So we completely understand that it's very difficult for our speakers to get here.
Even if we help cover the costs, it's still like two or three days that they're losing.
It's a long time here.
Yeah.
But even still, we do get a pretty good engagement with overseas attendees and speakers.
Yeah.
And we certainly did have a travel assistance for overseas speakers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'm very much looking to park on Australia this year.
I'm very much looking forward to not organising much at all.
I'm looking forward to introducing the team for 2018-2019 into the team this year,
so that they can take over smoothly as well.
Excellent.
So, yeah, I guess I'll see you at that conference then.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you very much, Richard.
Thank you, Clinton.
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