June 13th Meeting - Back to Basics

[Peter J. Farrell]

Hi Pymntosians!

Just thinking ahead for June already here and I thought that a Back to Basics night would be a great idea for beginners to experts alike.  It's always good to hear and review the fundamentals every once in a while to learn tricks you never knew and to reground your foundation.

I think it would be great to have a bunch of 5 minute or less rapid-fire presentations on a variety of short topics.  Some ideas include but not limited to:

• Virtualenv / virtualenvwrapper / pip / requirements.txt
• Using Pickle
• @decorators are bliss/evil
• Swig
• The property keyword
• Multilingual support in a python application
• 10 modules *you* can't do without and why
  

Some longer 5-10 minute presentations

• Loop like a native (Ned Batchelder has a great presentation that somebody could present a shorter version: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/iter.html)

Our meetings can't happen without speakers and we draw our speakers from the group. Consider volunteering and give a talk -- we don't bite.  Also, volunteering to talk on a topic that you don't know well is a great motivator to learn something new!  You don't have be an expert -- just do some good research and organize it well!

Until we meet again,
.pjf

-- 
Peter J. Farrell
Principal Technologist - Maestro Publishing, LLC
http://blog.maestropublishing.com
Identi.ca / Twitter: @maestrofjp

Please do not send me Microsoft Office/Apple iWork documents. Send OpenDocument instead! http://fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/

[Ray Shan]

Hi Peter, I just spent some time lately diving deep into @decorators. It seems to be a pretty abstract concept for beginners. I'd be happy to put to together something short to present.

Ray

[Peter J. Farrell]

Its ok to be a bit abstract -- sometimes it is nice when it goes over your head and you just allow the information to wash over you.  In the future, you'll revisit the topic and learn more.

Consider you scheduled!

Anybody out there that would a basic data structures of Python (lists, dicts, tuples, etc.)?

Ray Shan said the following on 04/27/2013 10:43 AM:

--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PyMNtos" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pymntos+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

-- 
Peter J. Farrell
Principal Technologist - Maestro Publishing, LLC
http://blog.maestropublishing.com

Identi.ca / Twitter: @maestrofjp

* Learn about VSRE. I prioritize emails with VSRE in the subject!  http://vsre.info/
* Please do not send me Microsoft Office/Apple iWork documents. Send OpenDocument instead! http://fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/

[Gregg Lind]

Actually I am open to doing basic types one, provisionally.

[Peter J. Farrell]

Gregg Lind said the following on 04/27/2013 06:56 PM:

Actually I am open to doing basic types one, provisionally.

Great Gregg! That would be wonderful.  What's the provision here ;-)?

[Gregg Lind]

Two provisions

1.  Checking my work schedule to make sure I am in town

2. Finding a way of talking about them that isn't horrendously boring.  I have thought about this topic a lot :).

--

[Peter J. Farrell]

Gregg Lind said the following on 04/27/2013 07:15 PM:

1.  Checking my work schedule to make sure I am in town

This seems reasonable to me unless you're going to do the preso by telepathy ;-)

2. Finding a way of talking about them that isn't horrendously boring.  I have thought about this topic a lot :).

It is what it is ultimately in the end. I do think it's an important topic to cover.

[Kevin Hanson]

Sounds like we've got a good start for the June meeting. Can we get all the lightning talk slots filled by the May meeting?

It's been a while since I've given a talk--I'll do one for TabLib (and possibly touch on other tabular data libraries, too).

So far we have the following line-up:

1. Basic Types - Gregg Lind (tentative)

2. Decorators - Ray Shan

3. TabLib - Kevin Hanson

4. TBD

5. TBD

I'll second the request for someone to speak on iteration, and someone to speak on virtualenv; any topics would be more than welcome though!

Python newcomers--any topics you'd like to have covered?

- Kevin 

[Ray Shan]

Looking forward to the TabLib talk Kevin, sounds like a great package for those of us having to deal with data a lot.

Ray

[Kurt Wiersma]

As a newcomer I would love to see an overview of essential 3rd party or built-in libraries that come up often when using Python.

--

[jay]

Just thinking ahead for June already here and I thought that a Back to Basics night would be a great idea for beginners to experts alike.  It's always good to hear and review the fundamentals every once in a while to learn tricks you never knew and to reground your foundation.

I'd be happy to do a talk on imports (in python 2.x, specifically). There may be some basics there that are a bit obscure, and I know there are some somewhat less basic things about imports that people may run into at some point.

[Peter J. Farrell]

Jay, sound great!  Let me know your last name so we can update the schedule

So far we have the following line-up:

1. Basic Types - Gregg Lind (tentative)

2. Decorators - Ray Shan

3. TabLib - Kevin Hanson

4. Imports - Jay ?

5. TBD

I think a "Loop Like a Native" ala Ned Batchelder's talk would be a great last talk -- free slides and ideas here - http://nedbatchelder.com/text/iter.html Any takers? 

jay said the following on 05/06/2013 03:27 PM:

Just thinking ahead for June already here and I thought that a Back to Basics night would be a great idea for beginners to experts alike.  It's always good to hear and review the fundamentals every once in a while to learn tricks you never knew and to reground your foundation.

I'd be happy to do a talk on imports (in python 2.x, specifically). There may be some basics there that are a bit obscure, and I know there are some somewhat less basic things about imports that people may run into at some point.

-- 
Peter J. Farrell
Principal Technologist - Maestro Publishing, LLC
http://blog.maestropublishing.com

Identi.ca / Twitter: @maestrofjp

* Learn about VSRE. I prioritize emails with VSRE in the subject!  http://vsre.info/
* Please do not send me Microsoft Office/Apple iWork documents. Send OpenDocument instead! http://fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/

[Andrew Carter]

Peter, I would be happy to cover something at the meeting.  Your choice -- I can cover Ned's slides (or a subset of them or the essence of them) or I would also be happy to cover pickle.  I can mostly cover the basics but would also like to cover __getstate__ and __setstate__ and quickly the much more advanced topic of persisent_id: 

http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#pickling-and-unpickling-external-objects

This is something I've used a lot when building large persistence systems.  And always had this comment I liked: 

http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#id18

Covering pickle is a bit quicker of a talk (I think) but iterating is probably more necessary everyday knowledge -- again, your choice.

Andrew

--

[Peter Farrell]

I think Pickle would be a shorter talk.  How about both if you don't mind?  If so, I think that would round out June pretty nicely don't you think?  And yes, I think you're right that an iteration talk would be merely the essence of Ned's talk.

So far we have the following line-up:
1. Basic Types - Gregg Lind (tentative)

2. Imports - Jay
3. Loop like a native - Andrew Carter
4. Decorators - Ray Shan
5. TabLib - Kevin Hanson
6. Pickle - Andrew Carter

Andrew Carter said the following on 05/06/2013 07:51 PM:

>
> Peter, I would be happy to cover something at the meeting.  Your choice -- I can cover Ned's slides (or a subset of them or the essence of them) or I would also be happy to cover pickle.  I can mostly cover the basics but would also like to cover __getstate__ and __setstate__ and quickly the much more advanced topic of persisent_id: 
>
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#pickling-and-unpickling-external-objects
>
> This is something I've used a lot when building large persistence systems.  And always had this comment I liked: 
>
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#id18
>
> Covering pickle is a bit quicker of a talk (I think) but iterating is probably more necessary everyday knowledge -- again, your choice.
>
> Andrew

[Peter J. Farrell]

I think Pickle would be a shorter talk. How about both if you don't
mind? If so, I think that would round out June pretty nicely don't you
think? And yes, I think you're right that an iteration talk would be
merely the essence of Ned's talk.

So far we have the following line-up:
1. Basic Types - Gregg Lind (tentative)

2. Imports - Jay
3. Loop like a native - Andrew Carter
4. Decorators - Ray Shan
5. TabLib - Kevin Hanson
6. Pickle - Andrew Carter

Andrew Carter said the following on 05/06/2013 07:51 PM:

> Peter, I would be happy to cover something at the meeting. Your
> choice -- I can cover Ned's slides (or a subset of them or the essence
> of them) or I would also be happy to cover pickle. I can mostly cover
> the basics but would also like to cover __getstate__ and __setstate__
> and quickly the much more advanced topic of persisent_id:
>
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#pickling-and-unpickling-external-objects
>
> This is something I've used a lot when building large persistence
> systems. And always had this comment I liked:
>
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#id18
>
> Covering pickle is a bit quicker of a talk (I think) but iterating is
> probably more necessary everyday knowledge -- again, your choice.
>
> Andrew

[jay]

Last name is Groven

[Peter J. Farrell]

Totally left off Ray Shan on @Decorators for our June meeting:

So far we have the following line-up:
1. Basic Types - Gregg Lind (tentative)
2. Imports - Jay
3. Loop like a native - Andrew Carter
4. Decorators - Ray Shan
5. TabLib - Kevin Hanson
6. Pickle - Andrew Carter

[Ray Shan]

No worries, I'm still up for it if you guys are.

Ray

[Peter J. Farrell]

I decided to round off the evening, I'll do a quick preso on VirtualEnv,
VirtualEnvWrapper, Pip and Pip-Tools since these are really basics
everybody should be using.

Peter J. Farrell said the following on 05/13/2013 03:36 PM:

> Totally left off Ray Shan on @Decorators for our June meeting:
>
> So far we have the following line-up:

> 1. VirtualEnv, VirtualEnvWrapper, Pip and Pip-Tools
> 2. Basic Types - Gregg Lind (tentative)
> 3. Imports - Jay
> 4. Loop like a native - Andrew Carter
> 5. Decorators - Ray Shan
> 6. TabLib - Kevin Hanson
> 7. Pickle - Andrew Carter