I have been binge watching Pycon 2014 videos and I thought I might as well make that productive somehow, so here's a list of the best videos (in my very humble opinion)!

I haven't watched every single Pycon video so please be sure to recommend your favorites in the comments!

Python Macgyvering

David Beazley slays it. As an expert witness he writes his own versions of simple things and comes up with interesting ways to reverse engineering/research a huge codebase.

"Discovering Python"

Imposter Syndrome

Julie Pagano reminds us to maybe not be so hard on ourselves. This one is especially important to me, because I am starting a new job soon and there's a large part of me that feels like I may not fit in.

That is bull shit!

I don't know why we get these strange fears. Everyone has that awkward first day but I'm sure at my new job the people are looking out for my best interests. They want me to be happy and feel welcomed, so I just need to think positive and do my best—no reason to worry!

"It's Dangerous to Go Alone: Battling the Invisible Monsters in Tech - PyCon 2014"

Helicopter Badassery

Ned Jackson Lovely flies an awesome little helicopter around with python! Imagine flying this into your family and friends via iPython, what joy!

This also goes into quite a bit of arduino stuff which is something I am trying to get into, pretty interesting.

"Cheap Helicopters In My Living Room"

Memcached ins-and-outs

Guillaume Ardaud goes into some great specific about memcached, a lot of stuff I didn't know--like you pronounce memcached "memcache dee"!

I think this guy is a pretty good speaker to model yourself after. He was confident and obviously practiced a lot beforehand, really enjoyed this presentation.

"Cache me if you can: memcached, caching patterns and best practices"

Machine learning for personalized Hacker News

Ned Jackson Lovely did an awesome presentation on machine learning/sciki. It was very beginner friendly. My favorite part was probably the flow chart "if you have less than 50 samples, get more samples."

"Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Again"

Computer Science education in the US

Jessica McKellar talks about how we could get more kids involved with computer science. What I thought stood out about her presentation was concrete ideas/details, like:

• Make Computer Science count as a Math/Sci credit instead of being an elective -- encourages teachers and students to take it more seriously
• Switch from Java to Python—don't throw people into the deep end of OOP, etc.
• Call your local school board/legislature and talk about the above simple steps.

"Keynote"

Chin Up is my personal motivation tracker. Every day I rate from 1 to 10 how I am feeling in certain metrics like strength, flexibility, relationships and happiness.

There are two types of metrics:

• Daily - Measured every day
• Monthly - Measured on the first of every month

It is meant to be hosted locally/somewhere free, like Heroku.

What I track

If you want the same setup I have, go to the admin screen and add these items.

Daily checklist (binary=True)

• Vitamins
• Coffee
• 20 pushups for 3 sets
• 20 squats for 3 sets
• 8 pull ups for 3 sets
• (a lot more, this depends entirely on what you do/want to do every day)

Daily tracking

• Happy
  • 1 being seeing my mom with tubes coming out of her face and head
  • 10 being happiest I've ever been, nothing feels impossible
• Motivated
  • 1 being ultra depressed not even eating
  • 10 being I did everything I needed to and more
• Flexibility
  • 1 being no stretching in chair all day no walking around
  • 10 being I did every stretch possible and did the splits
• Strength
  • 1 being I feel as soft as an 8 year old girl
  • 10 being I squatted and deadlifted the day before--now I can't move
• Endurance
  • 1 being I got winded getting out of my chair
  • 10 being I jump roped for 10 minutes and ran a mile without breathing hard
• Relationship
  • 1 being I got into a huge argument and feel terrible
  • 10 being we made dinner together and wrote each other poetry

Monthly tracking

• Life goals
  • 1 being no progress towards goals and very depressed
  • 10 being I got a world record deadlift
• Power
  • 1 being no physical activity
  • 10 being I ran and worked out every opportunity I had
• Nature
  • 1 being no outdoor activity
  • 10 being I spent the entire time camping and fishing

Why?

To become the best I can be: I need motivation, I need to get my chin up.

How do you measure?

Every metric that I believe significantly effects my motivation and health will be measured on a scale from 1 to 10. If there is something significant to note, I'll put that down as well. However, the main goal is to motivate myself through numbers and statistics.

1 being the worst, least effort I could possibly put in and 10 being the best, most effort I could possibly put in.

Ease of use

To make it easier to use, I made a simple app and threw it on pypi called django-pin-passcode. It logs you in to the user you define after you enter a certain passcode composed of 0-9 and #.

Stats

• Month to month - Average for the entire month
• Week to week - Average for the entire week
• Day of the week - Average for that day of the week for the last year
• 7 day - Last 7 day simple
• 30 day - Last 30 day simple

Correlations

Thanks to numpy I added really quick correlations between metrics, it's pretty ugly but it will tell you what metrics might positively/negatively correlate to each other.