The SciPy conference was great this year, as always. It started with two days of tutorials, which I co-organized with Justin Vincent. Those seemed to go well and I enjoyed the ones that I sat in on. Materials for many of the courses are available, as well as videos of the entire class.
The conference itself was three days of talks with a poster session one day. I got to give two talks on Friday of the conference:
Python in Tidal Energy Three Tools Used in a Collaboration on Array Optimization | SciPy 2015 | Kri
Perceptual Color Maps in matplotlib for Oceanography | SciPy 2015 | Kristen Thyng
The colormaps talk followed up on an excellent talk by Nathaniel Smith which explained the background of some color theory and proposed a new default colormap for matplotlib. He and Stefan van der Walt put together a helpful tool, viscm, for making colormaps that enforcing linear perceptual changes in space through the colormap.
There was excitement in the community about colormaps that was fun to participate in. My proposed set of colormaps, previously called cmtamu, is now renamed cmocean and is sitting under the umbrella of matplotlib. I'll be contributing to matplotlib in this area and hopefully more over time.
I was also honored to be included in a write up about the conference by Matt Hall, particularly for my talk on tidal energy.