Pypy

Part five of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

From Ryan Kelly’s talk I learned that it is actually possible, today, to run Python in a web browser (not something that interprets Python-like syntax and translates it into JavaScript, but an actual Python interpreter!). PyPy.js combines two technologies, PyPy (the Python interpreter written in Python) and Emscripten (an LLVM-to-JavaScript converter, typically used for getting games running in the browser), to run PyPy in the browser. This talk is a must-see for anyone who’s longed before to write client-side Python instead of JavaScript for a web app. While realistically being able to do this in production may still be a ways off, at least in part due to the multiple megabytes of JavaScript one needs to download to get it working, I enjoyed the view Ryan’s talk provided into the internals of this project. PyPy itself is always fascinating, and this talk made it even more so.

Last Friday everyone at Caktus set aside their regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for Caktus employees to take some time for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day saw everything from game development to Bokeh data visualization, Lego robots to superhero animation. Read more about the various projects from our Q2 2015 ShipIt Day.