RedSnake Philly 2013 has lightning talks on Ruby and Python trends in ‘Search Church’

As comes with active, two-decade-old programming languages, what is possible within the framework continues to evolve.

So the third annual RedSnake Philly event, featuring nearly a dozen 10-minute lightning talks, took over SEER Interactive’s Northern Liberties ‘Search Church’ last week to share best practices and bold projects using Ruby or Python to inspire, network and exchange ideas. (Recap last year here)

Tom Panzarella, founder and lead engineer at Love Park Robotics, started Red Snake Philly with Mat Schaffer, a DevOps, Rails and JS developer for hire as part of Mashion. The first meeting of RedSnake Philly was an informal get-together of the Philly.rb and PhillyPUG user groups. After receiving such a positive response from the gathering in 2011, the organizers decided to make the affair annual.

Check out Flickr photos of the event here.

This year’s free event sold out weeks before the gathering. Panzarella, Schaffer and Angel Pizarro, the third event organizer this year, explained what it took to pull of Red Snake Philly 2013. What did this year’s agenda have on tap?

• 5:50pm Pam Selle A Field Guide to Ruby and Python
• 6:00 Jearvon Dharrie Rails 4 / Ruby 2
• 6:10 Jeffrey J. Persch Testing Python Web Applications at Scale
• 6:30 Justin Campbell Using RubyMotion for rapid iOS development
• 6:40 Scott Determan Vision Spreadsheet: An Environment for Computer Vision
• 6:50 Kyle Burton The Patterns You Can’t {See, Refactor}
• 7:20 Dave Richardson C++ templates
• 7:40 Hector Castro Building Command-line Applications with Ruby
• 7:50 Dan Williams Using SimPy to Model AWS Autoscaling for Realtime Computation
• 8:10 Rob DiMarco Building Android Apps with JRuby and Ruboto
• 8:20 Tom Adelman How the python got it’s stripes: Simulating nature’s patterns with Numpy

Sponsors of the event included Philadelphia-based companies Monetate, SIG, Relay, Jobspring Partners and Basho Technologies to name a few.

The organizers of the event want RedSnake Philly to become the largest programming and tech event for programmers and coders to be a part of and experience in the region. They also want the city to be recognized for its tech talent, they say.

“This event is by hackers, for hackers, with no fluff. Why do I do it? Because I care. I run PhillyPUG, I’m good friends with all these people. In general I care about putting Philadelphia on the map,” Panzarella said.

Panzarella also thinks that Philly tech scene is coming along. He believes that one way Philly will benefit in the tech race is that the community shouldn’t try to be like anyone else. There are many cities that are commercial web startup hubs, and he doesn’t believe this is one of Philadelphia’s strengths. He emphasizes that Philly has a lot of excellent science and medical technology. The city should be playing up these strengths.

Watch a video interview with organizers here.

This report was done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.