PyCon Rehearsals 4: Shelling out and Games for Science

Join us for 2 PyCon talk rehearsals, sponsored by Scout (http://goscoutgo.com).

Subprocess to FFI: Memory, Performance, and Why You Shouldn't Shell Out — Christine Spang (45 min)

Sometimes, the code you need just isn't available in Python, but someone's written some code in another language that solves your problem. What options do you have for interacting with this external code from within your program? We'll examine how to call external binaries, what happens behind the scenes at a systems level, and how these implementation details affect performance and memory usage. In the second part of the talk, we'll discuss the different options for more tightly integrating external code in the form of a C library for better performance and control.

Games for Science, interactive psychology experiments w/ Panda3D — Peter Battaglia + Jessica Hamrick (30 min)

Have you ever wanted to play video games while also contributing to science? In psychology experiments developed by myself and Peter Battaglia, participants are immersed in an interactive 3D world which is experimentally well-controlled, yet also extremely fun. This talk will explain how we created these "game-like" experiments in Python using the Panda3D video game engine.