Work I Completed
As the title suggests, PyCon was on this week and Winstons long awaited presentation finally had its chance to shine. But before that, what more was done with Winston? Winston had to have some more progress done in an attempt to make him work for PyCon. Particularly, his legs required last minute modifications to try to stop him from collapsing. The idea was to add an exterior support, mimicking the fibula/tibia pairing, but place it on the thigh rather than the shin. This ultimately failed, but that was because of the last minute methods used to achieve this, resulting in a poor manner of securing it to the other part of the leg. I still believe doing this properly will have some noticeable effect, and in my next iteration I do plane to incorporate it, however, that is a problem for another day.
The rest of this week was spent making final finishing touches to Winston, and preparing a presentation for PyCon itself. This brought some issues, as there was a 10 minute time limit, for the 3 of us to present in. That’s right, if i haven’t mentioned in previous posts, this was a 3 person project. I worked on Winston himself, while my team members, Morgan Potter and Josh Kisnorbo, worked on computer vision and network communication respectively. This was not enough time. Each of us could easily talk about our respective parts for 30 minutes. Squishing this down to be about a 10th of that each was challenging, and wasn’t even achieved until the hour before the presentation. We decided on a rough structure relatively early to get an idea of how long each segment should be. We decided that I would take the first 3 (ish) minutes to introduce Winston, his origin, and the theory. Morgan would then get the next 3 (ish) minutes to discuss computer vision and analytics therein, and Josh would get the next 3 (ish) minutes to talk about the radio and communication. This left 1 minute, plus any time not accounted for by people finishing early (although only adding seconds), to conclude. This conclusion incorporated me showing Winston squirming around, and explaining while he didn’t work. Because of the failure that had occurred, we decided to try and make a funny talk, which we managed successfully! Our jokes seemed to land which made continuing to present a lot easier.
PyCon
What else happened at PyCon? There were a lot of interesting talks by many people, including some about digital rights (and wrongs), or people telling the stories associated with apps they developed like Secateur. There were also some very interesting talks in the student showcase, such as someone making a neural network to write generative music, or someone adding colour to ascii art images from their webcam in real time. However, none came close to Winston.
Reflection
This was a big week, and although I am tired, exams are tomorrow. It is a massive relief that this presentation is now done – the stress this gave me has made me sick :(. Although the nerves were prominent at PyCon, their community is truly one of the nicest out there, and it showed during our presentation. This experience is one that I am very grateful for getting the opportunity to get, and even if I am not presenting, I am keen to come back next year.
Also, Adelaide is really nice.