I’ve completely neglected my blog, even though I initially planned to write here fairly regularly. Oh well - a year-end review post is a good opportunity to briefly describe the events that have happened recently.

Like many others, I followed the live coverage of WWDC. It’s interesting that, unlike previous events, some sites didn’t bother to do live coverage pages, and instead started tweeting about it. Most likely this has to do with their inability to handle the load properly: in previous years many of these sites had outages, and even now the same AppleInsider has switched to live coverage mode where you can’t see anything except the live feed, and at the top of the site there’s a huge red notice saying “During the live broadcast the page updates automatically” :)

October fourth was my last day at Svyaztransneft JSC. I worked there for almost four years, during which I:

• Worked on the development of almost all modules of our enterprise management system in one way or another (“Document Management”, “Budgeting”, “Contract Management”, etc.)
• Developed and improved the system’s base classes and components
• Developed tools for automating debugging, testing and other operations
• Set up and maintained a part of the development infrastructure
• Migrated the project to new components, IDE versions, and version control system
• Presented at a Young Specialists competition, where I showed off our team’s work on budgeting automation and took first prize.

The time has come to move on. Since October fifth, I’ve been working at the Moscow branch of MegaFon, where I’m developing a portal using Django/Oracle, statistics collection systems, and a number of other tasks.

There are tons of ways to install Python packages. Some are more convenient, some less so, depending on the situation. I’ll describe the approach that I’ve found most convenient in the majority of cases.

To use it, you don’t need anything except virtualenv and pip themselves.

Until recently, I really envied Ukrainians because they have a pretty solid Python community. There are tons of conferences — off the top of my head, I remember Kiyv.py, KharkivPy, PyConUA, and I’m sure the Python scene was buzzing at less formal meetups too. In Moscow, nothing like that existed, even though quite a few Python developers attended Yandex.Saturday, YaC, DevConf, and other events. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

The Machine Learning course from Coursera has ended. Well, it ended for me — assignments can still be submitted until August first.

I liked the course. I originally signed up because I wanted to use machine learning in a couple of my projects. Now I have a better understanding of what can be done with machine learning and what kind of results to expect.

Another impression that first arose from a university artificial intelligence course, and which repeated itself now — I’m surprised at how simple and understandable the ideas behind these algorithms are, backed by mathematical foundations. Take gradient descent, for example — that’s covered in the first year of university!