The Melbourne Python Users Group

The Melbourne Python Users Group normally meets on every first Monday of the month (except January).

The Melbourne Python Users Group meetings are organised by the community itself. The ongoing organiser is Ed Schofield. Other organisers past have included Juan Nunez-Iglesias, Javier Candeira, Graeme Cross, Tennessee Leeuwenburg, and Richard Jones.

If you would like to give a talk at an upcoming event, please email ed@pythoncharmers.com or the mailing list!

Next Meeting

Monday 2019-12-02, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Luke Clarke: Automating WordPress audit with Python

Luke will present the Python-based tools he has used to navigate automatically through 20+ clients' WordPress sites and gather their PHP version, WordPress version, plugin versions, whether there are plugin updates outstanding.

2. Ed Schofield: First look at TensorFlow Probability

Ed will give a brief introduction to Bayesian machine learning and a first look at the TensorFlow Probability library.

3. Announcements

When: 5.45pm for mingling; talks starting at 6pm

Where: Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD (Outcome.Life, near corner Bourke & Elizabeth Streets)

How to get there: Walk 8 minutes from Flinders Street station or 5 minutes from Melbourne Central station.

Afterwards: pizza

Sponsorship: many thanks to Outcome Life for providing the venue, Biarri https://biarri.com for sponsoring pizzas and Python Charmers for organisation and meetup sponsorship.

We hope to see you there! :-D

Mailing List

We also communicate about the meetings and about anything Python via our mailing list.

Newcomers are always welcome to attend or write to the mailing list, we're a friendly bunch!

We have a policy about job offers on the mailing list:

• As long as it's a Python-related job offer by the hiring company and not by an intermediary recruiter, you can just send it to the mailing list.
• If it's not Python-related, or the poster of the job ad is a recruiter who won't mention the company that will be doing the hiring, please just use Seek or Monster, and don't write to the mailing list.

Code of conduct

Though we are not affiliated with Linux Australia or Pycon AU, we've chosen to follow their Code of Conduct for our meetings. Not because we've ever had any problem in the past, but so that we know what to do if any problem should arise in the future.

Meeting topics

If you're not sure on a topic, or don't want to give a presentation, perhaps you could give us an idea of topics or areas that you would like to hear about - that way we can encourage people who have that particular area of expertise, but who might be wavering. Some topics that have been suggested are:

• Django, Flask, Mezzanine, other web tools
• Data analysis: pandas, scikit-learn, numpy, ...
• Science / engineering in Python
• Databases, unit testing, design patterns
• Visualization: 2D and 3D
• PIL, pygame, pyopengl
• Devops, Cloud Computing

• User interfaces with PyQt, wxPython / Phoenix, ...

• Packaging: pypi, distutils, virtualenv, venv, conda

• Interpreters etc.: PyPy, Cython, IronPython, CPython internals, bytecode hacking

• ... if you are interested in a particular topic, add it here!

Previous Meetings & Topics

Monday 2019-11-04, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. David Andersson: Reduce API Code Duplication with OpenAPI and SQLAlchemy

In this talk David will introduce his OpenAPI-SQLAlchemy package, which seeks to use schemas from an OpenAPI specification to define the SQLAlchemy models. This reduces code duplication, automatically propagates database schema changes to the API specification and documentation and adds support for references and inheritance in SQLAlchemy models.

2. Lolitha Ratnayake: What's New in Python 3.8

Python 3.8 was released on 2019-10-14. We will be discussing what the major changes are and why you should care.

Monday 2019-10-07, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Juan Nunez-Iglesias: napari: a fast, n-dimensional image viewer in Python (~25 minutes)

Juan will give a demo of napari, an OpenGL and Qt-based viewer for nD arrays, with a focus on biology. By default, napari will render a 2D slice of an nD array and provide sliders for any additional dimensions, but with one click it can also render 3D and remove one of the sliders. Napari can overlay multiple volumes and layers of different types (images, points, shapes, ...), allowing annotation of nD images. Finally, napari is compatible with dask arrays, making it able to view enormous datasets that don't fit in RAM.

2. Clinton Roy: Python packaging with Poetry (~30 minutes)

This talk aims to look at some of the ways Poetry moves the conversation forward, learns from other packaging ecosystems, and where Python itself is going.

We will be talking file formats, Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) to do with packaging, different packaging ideologies and looking at what we can learn from completely different languages.

We’ll also be taking a look at the community’s approach to finding the way forward.

Monday 2019-09-02, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Michael Milewski: Next-level test driven development with TCR (~15-20 minutes)

Developers love to write code but once the code is undergoing iterative development by a group of developers, testing the code is a must. A lot of developers under the Extreme Programming movement even choose to write their tests first in Test Driven Development, TDD. TCR, or "test && commit || revert" is taking it to the next level. Not only do you write your tests first but if your test passes then the code will be committed and if it fails - deleted and you start again. A brief coding demo of writing code with no tests, the benefit of test driving code with TDD and finally seeing what we can learn from TCR.

2. Genevieve Buckley: Recap of the 2019 SciPy conference (~40 minutes)

Genevieve Buckley is a scientific programmer who loves working in Python. She just got back from the 2019 SciPy conference in Austin, Texas and is here to tell you all about it.

Monday 2019-08-05, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Bradley van Ree: Integrating Excel and Python

Exploring a collection of utilities and libraries which compliment each other for data analysis.

Brad has had close to 6 years experience in quantitative data analysis in the energy sector and has identified a niche for tools which are interfaced through Excel and leverage the richness of Python. The tools he has integrated are MS Excel, xlwings and koala which, when brought together, become greater than the sum of the parts.

2. Ed Schofield: Julia for Python users

A first look at what the Julia language offers, from a long-time Python user.

Monday 2019-06-03, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Slava Razbash: How to foretell with Python and AutoML

Slava will show you how AutoML can be used in a bank marketing use case. Predictive modelling that once required deep data science skills is now accessible to the AI Engineer. This talk makes use of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Services. The same principles can be applied to any cloud provider or any in-house setup.

2. Dilan Kalpa: Accessing Google Spreadsheet Data using Python

When people need to build a CRUD app for internal use, most probably think of using a database like MySQL or MongoDb. But Google Docs as a backend (consumed via JSON) really does come in handy when it comes to handling internal app data.

In this presentation, Dilan is going to show you how to use the Gspresd Python package to read, write, and delete data from a Google Spreadsheet with just a few lines of code.

Monday 2019-05-06, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Ben Dechrai: "Let's connect our front door to the internet! What could possibly go wrong?"

Securing IoT is hard, and the last thing we want to do is let some stranger in! Let's take a step back and consider other ways of securing that door, and granting access remotely, without connecting your door to the internet, while adhering to common protocols and data formats throughout. By mixing up a little Near Field Communication with JSON Web Tokens, sprinkling some Rich Communication Services and a fairly simple native mobile app, we should be able to create and demo an effective security process for letting the milkman in!

Join us on this interactive journey, and maybe when one door closes, another will, actually, open.

2. Ned Letcher: "Snek Wrangling: Python Installation and Package management with pyenv, pip-tools, and pipx"

Python's "batteries included" philosophy means it comes bundled with a rich standard library offering a powerful set of accelerators. When it comes to managing Python installations and project dependencies, however, the built-in tooling leaves something to be desired. Virtual environments are crucial for isolating your project dependencies, but they can be frustrating to work with without any supporting tooling. Python's "pip" package manager is great, but it does not provide a built-in means for defining and tracking project requirements separate from downstream dependencies. After some experimentation and a few projects later, it's all too easy to get yourself into a spaghetti-like mess of various Python installations that can step on each other's toes.

In this talk, Ned will describe a toolchain containing the packages pyenv, pip-tools, and pipx, that together help smooth over these challenges and remove friction from your Python development experience.

Monday 2019-04-01, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Zaar Hai: Packaging Python apps for Docker (part 2)

Abstract: Zaar will describe some more advanced topics that follow on from his Melbourne Python User Group talk in February:

• Private repos
• Pipenv
• Non-root installs

2. Ed Schofield: Top usability bugs in Python and its packages

Python and its ecosystem of packages have been improving steadily for decade and are generally high-quality. In this talk Ed will give an opinionated look at some remaining rough edges, particularly those that affect beginners.

Monday 2019-03-04, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Michael Milewski: VI everywhere -- what's your superpower

Abstract: "Once you learn VI bindings, they will be stuck with you for life -- and you will want to use them everywhere. This is an exploration of all the places you can use them, from the command line, Python REPL, to your database console, browser and program input, even ways of adding them to places they don't exist. Even if VI has always been on your TODO list, some tips on how to get started in learning VI bindings from someone who is pragmatic and does NOT use VIM as their editor, just VI bindings in every place you would least expect.

2. Chris Grainger: Software craftsmanship and AI: mutually exclusive?

No show

3. Henry Walshaw: Scripting PowerPoint

Monday 2019-02-11, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. New venue! Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Zaar Hai: Packaging Python apps for Docker (part 1)

Zaar will describe lessons he's learned with building Docker images for Python, including:

• starting from the right image to minimize its size
• using multistage builds with Python apps and proper artifact carry-over
• secrets and installation from private repos during docker build

2. Ben Dechrai: Security and privacy at a high level: token-based authentication, JSON Web Tokens, etc.

Monday 2018-12-17, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. New venue! Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Henry Walshaw: Python in QGIS

QGIS is the world's largest open-source GIS platform. Two of the lead developers are based here in Australia. The primary scripting environment for QGIS is Python 3. This is a quick walkthrough of QGIS and how to script it with Python for spatial analysis and automatic map generation.

2. Ed Schofield: Girls in Tech

Python Charmers has recently formed a partnership with Girls in Tech to deliver coding bootcamps at locations around Asia. I'll describe the first two events (in Jakarta and Seoul) -- what we did, what went well, what we learned.

Thursday 2018-11-15, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. New venue! Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Janis Lesinskis: CPython internals (~30 minutes)

Janis will talk about how Python (CPython) manages its underlying memory. It's an overview of how Python objects end up represented in memory. This covers the concepts of stack frames and Python objects and how CPython manages the memory that these use via reference counting.

2. Nathan Faggian: Using Google Cloud with Python (~25 minutes)

Nathan will talk about AI/ML and walk through a cool platform called cloud ML engine. We will also have a look at Colab - Google's free Jupyter notebook environment.

Monday 2018-10-01, 5:45pm for 6:00pm. New venue! Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD

Talks:

1. Ned Letcher: Creating interactive dashboards with Plotly Dash (~30 minutes)

Dash is a framework for building modern data-driven web-apps in Python. In this talk, Ned will describe how Dash builds on Flask, React, and Plotly.js to provide a platform for Python developers to build analytical web applications, without requiring any JavaScript. I'll also walk through some example Dash apps, showing how it can be used for rapidly building production-grade custom dashboards as well as prototyping proof-of-concept interfaces.

2. Sam Bourne: Leveraging type annotations (~25 minutes)

Sam will talk about the use of type annotations at VFX company Luma Pictures for helping us avoid mistakes in a large shared codebase. He will showcase PyCharm's wonderful static type checker and give a demo of how you can generate dynamically created user interfaces (in Qt) by inspecting types.

When: 5.45pm for mingling; talks starting at 6pm

Where: New venue! Level 2, 17 Hardware Lane, Melbourne CBD (Outcome.Life, near corner Bourke & Elizabeth Streets)

How to get there: Walk 8 minutes from Flinders Street station or 5 minutes from Melbourne Central station.

Afterwards: pizza

Sponsorship: many thanks to Outcome Life for providing the venue, Biarri https://biarri.com for sponsoring pizzas and Python Charmers for ongoing organisation and meetup sponsorship.

Monday 2018-09-03, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Peter Degorski: Weather, Energy, and Python (~30 minutes)

"Energy Analytics is a new industry which Victoria is well positioned to lead in. Python is one of the wonderful tools that are adaptable enough to keep up with the enormous fast paced change. Pvlib-python and windpowerlib are great open source python tools used to model and study utility scale modules and wind turbines. Both are highly customisable. These two renewable energy modelling packages can run stand-alone and with some effort can be adapted to run on historical weather datasets. Doing this can help with the analysis of correlations in the wind/solar generation portfolio of Victoria. Python was the perfect package for this type of project; in my case it was used end to end; from downloading of the data to data modelling, analysis and ultimately visualisation."

2. Ed Schofield: Handling physical quantities and units with Python (~15 minutes)

Following on from Peter's talk, Ed will give an overview of the why and how of Python tools to handle units easily for scientific and engineering-heavy fields.

Monday 2018-08-06, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Damien George, Nick Moore, Matt Trentini: A Taste of MicroPython (~30 minutes)

Python can be used for a vast range of tasks like web development, data science and machine learning. With MicroPython, embedded development can now be added to the domains in which Python excels.

Come along and listen to the creator of MicroPython - and two converts! - explain why the language was created and how it manages to run on resource-constrained microcontrollers. Demonstrations will showcase effective applications for the language and explain why MicroPython is compelling in the embedded space.

Note: There will be time, during or after pizza, to ask questions and tinker with some hardware. Bring a laptop if you'd like to play with a microcontroller!

2. Rory Hart: The future of Python dependency management (~25 minutes)

Pipenv is now the recommended tool for application dependency management. Rory will talk through what problems Pipenv solves and introduce its usage through a live demonstration.

Monday 2018-07-02, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Rory Hart: Just enough OpenID Connect (~25 minutes) - rescheduled from June

Many of us encounter authentication protocols as a side effect of just trying to get things done. The simple task of accessing data from a client API or integrating with a third parties balloons out into a yak shaving session filled with obtuse authentication failure messages. Rory will walk through a number of scenarios involving OpenID Connect and offer practical guidance on productively using Python to work with OpenID Connect.

2. Ed Schofield: Pandas - under the fur (~20 minutes)

Ed will talk about advanced topics in Pandas such as:

• performance: what operations are slow and what to do about it
• internals: views and copies, chained indexing
• avoiding gotchas with data types

and the design decisions behind Pandas 2.

Monday 2018-06-04, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Ruslan Dautov: JupyterHub and Apache Spark in the data center (~20 minutes)

Ruslan, a Research Assistant and PhD student at the Big Data Institute at Shengzhen University, will describe his research in GraphFrames and his experiences with JupyterHub and Apache Spark for supporting teams with shared computing infrastructure.

2. Michael Teasdale: Real-world case studies with Python-based web businesses (~20 minutes)

Michael has founded or worked for around a dozen e-commerce and logistics companies in Australia and Asia-Pacific that base their operations entirely on Python. He will describe some amazing success stories of Python adoption in automating various business processes. He will also describe workflow tools for ensuring sites are tested, robust, and production-ready in a short period of time.

3. Ed Schofield: Interactive visualisation with Altair (~20 minutes)

Monday 2018-05-07, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Graeme Cross: From "Glue it" to "Ship it" (~25 minutes)

Python is an excellent language for rapidly prototyping ideas, and is very well suited to gluing together different tools, libraries and frameworks into a cohesive prototype. However this doesn't always map well into a robust production code base for an application that is shipped out to paying customers.

This presentation will cover a checklist of considerations to factor into your project before you dive into your prototype to help make life easier, budgets lower, schedules shorter, lawyers poorer and customers happier when your well-received prototype then has to be shipped.

2. Mike Dewhirst: Chemical database scraping via Django Admin (20 minutes)

This is a beginner- to intermediate-level walk-through of a real-world project that uses Django and specifically its Admin interface.

The Django Admin was originally billed as being "production ready" code but this was watered down in the Django docs a couple of years ago. Mike's SharedSDS project is in production and he will explain in this talk why he thinks the Admin is magnificent.

3. Ed Schofield: What's New in Python (15 minutes)

Ed will give a brief run-down of new developments in the Python ecosystem in recent months.

Monday 2018-03-05, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Fred Rotbart: Hierarchical Temporal Memory in Python: part 2 (30-45 minutes)

Fred will give a refresher (for those who missed his talk in February) and then pick up where he left off last time, with various fancy demos of what's possible with Hierarchical Temporal Memory for learning patterns powerfully from small(ish) datasets.

2. Adel Fazel: Web data wrangling for beginners (20 minutes)

Adel will give an introductory talk about using Python for data wrangling, accessing web APIs, parsing JSON data, and manipulating it with Pandas. He will demonstrate this by accessing the New York Times API.

3. Ed Schofield: AlphaZero - background, how it works, and a general Python implementation (20 minutes)

AlphaZero is a major recent advance in self-play-based reinforcement learning from DeepMind that can learn complex 2-player strategy games like Go and Chess from scratch (with no human knowledge) and quickly surpass human capabilities. Ed will review the algorithm, how it works, what its future applications could be, and a general-purpose Python package for implementing it.

4. Lightning talks & announcements

When: 5.45pm for mingling; talks starting at 6pm

Where: Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street, Carlton

Sponsorship: many thanks to Outcome Hub for providing the venue and Python Charmers for ongoing Meetup sponsorship.

Monday 2018-02-05, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Fred Rotbart: Hierarchical Temporal Memory in Python (25-30 minutes)

2. Andrew Stuart: How to run your Python code in a Run-From-RAM operating system on a server on Google, Amazon or Digital Ocean. (10 minutes)

3. Ed Schofield: Data classes: what, where, why? (15 minutes)

4. Lightning talks & announcements

When: 5.45pm for mingling; talks starting at 6pm

Where: Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street, Carlton

Sponsorship: many thanks to Outcome Hub for providing the venue and Python Charmers for ongoing Meetup sponsorship.

We hope to see you there! :-D

Talks:

1. Javier Candeira: Batavia: A Python VM implementation in JavaScript (25-30 minutes)

2. Ed Schofield: What's New in Python (15-20 minutes)

3. Lightning talks & announcements

Monday 2017-11-06, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

1. Robert Lechte: "Your database migrations are bad." (25-30 minutes)

It's really hard to work with database schemas. But schemas are actually good. The trouble is that people get frustrated with the tooling. Existing migration tools (alembig, django migrations etc.) all make it far too hard. Every change is a chore when you have to worry about version numbers and migration files each time. It's tedious, manual, error-prone, and hard to test.

Fortunately, we can do better! Using Python and PostgreSQL, we'll discuss a radically different approach to managing schema migrations, using new tools and workflows to make it much faster, mostly automatic, fully testable, and more reliable."

Bio: Robert created the data warehousing for New Zealand's supercomputing infrastructure, then worked for the Digital Transformation Agency in Sydney. He has been writing Python tools to make working with databases more pleasant.

2. Fred Rotbart: Highlights from PyCon Israel 2017 (15 minutes)

Python wasn't particularly popular in Israel until recently but has exploded in popularity in the last 1-2 years. Fred attended PyCon Israel this year and was surprised at how large the community there is now. He will talk about the event, Python uptake in general, and give highlights from the event.

3. Ed Schofield: publishing with Python (25-30 minutes)

Python has long had Sphinx for generating high-quality technical documentation from reStructuredText (ReST). Many projects have more recently adopted one of many flavours of Markdown as a simple, flexible format, while Jupyter notebooks have taken the Python world by storm. This talk will give an overview of the impressive set of tools in R for publishing (knitr, Rmarkdown) and compare what the Python ecosystem has to offer.

Monday 2017-10-02, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks: 1. Renaldi Gondosubroto: "Moving Ahead with Internet of Things Developments in Python"

Abstract:

"In this talk, I will discuss how the Internet of Things is applied in Python at the moment and how it has progressed so far. This will be complemented by examples through some of my own experiences in projects involving the concept. One example of the practice that I will show is its use is through libraries created via TCP / IP connections to generate data collected from devices placed in other locations - and in this practice - measure environmental parameters in the environment through the Raspberry Pi. From here I will also discuss how other third party IoT services such as Amazon Web Services or ThingSpeak can also connect and manage smart devices from there, utilizing the MQTT protocol. Next I will talk more about how this is very useful from the point of view of consumers, and how the methodology of its use can be developed with code architecture in Python. After that, I will discuss the future of this IoT concept for Python, how I see this concept will grow on this platform, and future developments that can still be done at this time."

2. Andrew Peel: All about locking: the why, what, and how.

What to do for a thread-safe file system and how ScramFS implements locking.

Monday 2017-09-04, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks: 1. Linus Chang: ScramFS: a cryptographic filesystem in Python

Topics include:

- Meeting legal regulations around encryption, privacy, data breaches. Examples of ScramFS: CLI, API, Fuse mount, and GUI.

- Overview of cloud filesystems and their limitations: Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Dropbox. Attacking a filesystem.

- Encoding binary data as text: an overview of base64, uuencode, and alternatives suitable for encoding filenames

- How to implement an encrypted key-value store in 10 minutes flat

2. Ned Letcher: Reactive web visualisations using Dash

- An overview of making dashboards and other interactive data-oriented web interfaces using Dash, an open source library recently released by Plotly.

- Experiences with deploying Dash apps on AWS (and perhaps zappa.io).

Monday 2017-08-07, 5:45pm for 6:00pm, at Outcome-Hub Co-Working Space, Suite 1, 121 Cardigan Street Carlton

Talks:

• Clare Sloggett: Visualising data with Python
• Tyson Clugg: Python: Ludicrous mode (with Django)

• PyCon AU wrap-up

Monday, 2017-07-03, 6:00pm at One Roof Women, 77-83 City Road, Southbank VIC 3006.

Talks:

• Christian Azuero: The world of robots and the Robot Operating System.
• Ed Schofield: An introduction to Bayesian inference in Python

Monday, 2017-06-05, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton.

Talks:

• Nick Moore: MicroPython

Monday, 2017-05-01: cancelled

Monday, 2017-04-03, 6:00pm at Lab-14 Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton. (Note: the venue name has changed but not the location!)

Talks:

• Martin Schweitzer: "Finding Currajong with Python": a comparison of algorithms for partial string-matching (30 minutes)
• Jodie Burchell: Playing with VADER, a sentiment analysis package for social media (30 minutes)

Monday, 2017-03-06, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton.

Talks:

• Phil Elson: Biggus - a library for out-of-core massive array computations
• Jacqueline Nowak: Python Scripting in Fiji - or image processing for lazy people
• Martin Schweitzer: Python for Bioinformatics for learning Python

Monday, 2017-02-06, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton.

Talks:

• Ed Schofield: What's New in Python 3.6
• Justin Barton: Introduction to Pandas

Monday, 2016-12-05, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

• Linus Chang: The Scram encrypted filesystem in Python (including a demo of real-time streaming video decryption) (30 mins)
• John Barham: Tips and tricks on using Django: Mezzanine, django-impersonate, serving static files, etc. (20 mins)
• Juan Nunez-Iglesias: Numba (lightning talk: 10 mins)

Monday, 2016-11-07, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

• Brad Nguyen: Applying Data Science to build MVP products for artwork recommendation (10 mins)
• Ben Finney: How to Make Mistakes in Python: book review
• Robert Layton: New features in Pandas v0.19
• Kristine Howard: Lightning talk: Ways to encode data in knitting

Monday, 2016-09-05, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

• Juan Nunez-Iglesias: ImageXD & summary of SciPy 2016 & PyCon AU (30 mins)

• Ed Schofield: Creating branded reports from Jupyter notebooks (20 mins)
• Open slot (20 mins)
• Slot for lightning talks (5 x 2 mins)

Monday, 2016-07-04, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

• Don Jayamanne: Visual Studio Code for Python development
• Ed Schofield: Parallel computing with Dask
• Slot for lightning talks (5 x 2 mins)
  • Zaki Akhmad: Validating IP Address in Python 3
  • Ben: Semantic Versioning

Monday, 2016-06-06, 6:00pm at Hub Melbourne, Ground Floor, 673 Bourke Street, Melbourne CBD. (Please come to the side entrance on Godfrey Street).

Talk:

• Exploratory Data Analysis with Plotly - Jiun Siew

Monday, 2016-05-02, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

* Tennessee Leeuwenburg: PyCon AU 2016 (10 mins) * Alexey Kotlyarov: Behaviour-driven development in Python using Aloe (30 mins) * Ed Schofield: What's New in Python (May 2016) (15 mins) * Fred Rotbart: Useful Python tech and the state of Python in Israel (20 mins)

Monday, 2016-04-04, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

• Ed Schofield: A survey of machine learning tools in Python

• Ben Finney: group discussion on Command-line Programs in Python

Monday, 29 February 2016, 6:00pm at VLSCI Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 700 Swanton Street, Carlton

Talks:

• Juan Nunez-Iglesias: What's New in Python (February 2016 edition)
• Nuwan Goonasekera: Python-Cloudbridge, "a simple cross-cloud Python library"

Monday, 1 February 2016, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

Talks:

• Ed Schofield: Survey of Python data tools: toolz, NumPy, Pandas, xarray, Blaze, Dask, and Spark

• We are looking for more talks! If you would like to volunteer a talk, please email mailto:ed@pythoncharmers.com or the mailing list!

Monday, 7 December 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• Javier Candeira - Three book reviews

• Jeremy Kirkwood - Image Labeling with Lasagna.

Cancelled: Monday, 2 November 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• CANCELLED.

Monday, 5 October 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• Matthew Iversen - What's new in Python 3.5
• Brianna Laugher - Pytest Month Report.

Monday, 7 September 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• Andrew Walker - Better ways to make slides from ipython notebooks with Nbconvert, jinja2, reveal.js, mistune and some frustration. slides code

• Tyson Clugg - Selenium Page Adapter: https://github.com/tysonclugg/selenium-page-adapter

• Ed Schofield - Towards solving the Python 2/3 split with the past package: when backward compatibility is more important than forward compatibility, and how Python 3.x can run Python 2.x code automatically

August meeting - Cancelled for Pycon AU: Monday, 3 August 2015: no meeting

We will send email to the list if we organise an August meeting later in the month. For the time being, no meeting in August.

Monday, 27 July 2015, 6:00pm at TeamSquare, 1/520 Bourke St, Melbourne VIC 3000

This is a Pycon rehearsal session, please add the times for your presentations so we can organise an overflow session on the 28th if needed!

• Javier Candeira - Python metaprogramming with spreadsheets (Tutorial) - 90 minutes, boiled down to 1 hour.
• Oliver Nagy - 30 minutes.
• Ed Schofield - Interactive visualization for the curious - 30 minutes (if there's time)
• Andrew Stuart - 30 minutes.

All talks are PyCon rehearsals, so the speakers would welcome your feedback and criticism!

Monday, 6 July 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• Geoff Crompton - Testing ain't hard, even for SysAdmins

• Tennessee Leeuwenburg - Applied Data Analysis
• Tyson Clugg - Realtime websites with Django and Meteor

Monday, 1 June 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• Ed Schofield - interactive visualization in Python
• Lightning talks!
• Open Slot -- Suggest a talk!

Monday, 4 May 2015, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Juan Nunez-Iglesias -- Streaming data analysis

• Ryan Kelly -- intro to PyCon AU

April meeting - Cancelled for Easter: Monday, 6 April 2015: no meeting

Monday, 2 March 2015, 6:00pm

25 minute talks

• Robert Layton -- Authorship attribution of emails
• Javier Candeira -- Concatenative programming with Python
• Ryan Verner -- Open source video capture (title to be confirmed)

Monday, 2 February 2015, 6:00pm

25 minute talks

• What's New in Python, February Edition
• Linus Chang: Scram! (including a Kivy demo)
• Ed Schofield - Writing Python 2 / 3 compatible code

Monday, 1 December 2014, 6:00pm at 99 Designs: Level 2, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Ed Schofield -- What's New in Python, December Edition

• Ken Hu -- TextBlob, a NLTK wrapper that's a joy to use.

• Scott Brewer -- My Great War with Python (as seen in the WWI exhibition in Museum Victoria)

Monday, 10 November 2014, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Javier Candeira and Alan Pierce (unbeknownst to him) -- We had a communal session of Python Puzzlement over Alan Pierce's Python Puzzlers https://speakerdeck.com/alangpierce/python-puzzlers

45 minute talks

• Teennessee Leeuwenburg -- Wordgraph as an assistive technology and as an open source project that has a low barrier to participation that people might like to consider either using or contributing to. (https://github.com/tleeuwenburg/wordgraph and https://wordgraph.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

Monday, 6 October 2014, 6:00pm at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Ed Schofield -- What's New in Python, October Edition
• Oliver Nagy -- Building a Virtual Reality engine in (mostly) Python
• John Barham -- Mezzanine, a Django CMS

Monday, 1 September 2014, 6:00p.m.

• Javier Candeira -- What's New in Python, September Edition
• Jason King -- BDD using Behave with Selenium (the web browser automation tool, not the heavy metal)
• Andy Kitchen -- Pattern Recognition: Machine Learning on GPUs in the Cloud (the buzzwords are also interesting: Andy uses Bolzmann Machines with Theano and AWS)

Monday, 11 August 2014, 6:00p.m. at Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

Special Session

• MPUG Community -- What's New in Python, Pycon Australia 2014 Edition:

25 minute talks

• Juan Nuñez Iglesias -- What happened at SciPy 2014

• Rory Hart -- Python Micro-Service Architecture

10 minute lightning talks

• Nick Farrell -- sux.to_use('python2'), a compatibility bridge between Python3 and legacy Python2 libraries.

5 minute lightning talks

• Javier Candeira -- Doing what they told us not to do at two consecutive editions of Pycon Australia

Monday July 21, 6:00pm at 99Designs: Level 2, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond (one floor above Inspire 9) details here

• MPUG Community - Pre-conference evening of Python talks.

Monday, 7 July 2014, 6:00p.m.

25 minute talks

• Graeme Cross -- What's New in Python

45 minute talks

• Bernie Pope -- Implementing Python in Haskell, twice!

Monday 2 June 2014

• Lars Yencken -- What's New in Python
• Tim Asquith -- pyenv
• Chris Hausler -- Machine Learning with Pandas/Scikit.

Monday 5 May 2014, 6:00p.m.

15 minute talks

• Ben Finney -- What's New in Python
• Tom Allen -- NP-Complete game design in Python

25 minute talks

• Tim Richardson -- Introduction to web2py

Monday, 7 April 2014, 6:00 pm

15 minute talks

• Ed Schofield -- What's New in Python

25 minute talks

• Adrian Higgins -- Integrating specific Hardware with Python using existing C libraries on Windows.

• Ben Finney -- A Pythonista Meets JavaScript™: first steps

Monday 3rd March 2014, 6PM, Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

• Javier Candeira -- Dynamic REST APIs live.
• Andrew Walker -- How Hard Could it be to Implement Timeouts?

Monday 3rd Feburary 2014, 6PM, Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Ed Schofield -- Update on Python-Future for Python 2/3 compatibility
• Tennessee Leewenburg -- Verification: The art of knowing exactly how wrong you are.

10 minute talks

• Rory Hart -- Metaheuristics and Python

Monday 2th December 2013, 6PM, Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Luke Miller -- My big gay adventure. Making, releasing and selling an indie game made in python
• Bianca Gibson -- Python and LaTeX

10 minute talk

• Nathan Faggian -- Python and Supercomputers: Celery, Redis, Mongo

Monday 4th November 2013, 6PM, Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Lars Yencken -- Machine Vision with SimpleCV
• Nicole Harris -- Mezzanine ("the best Django CMS")

Monday 7th October 2013, 6PM, Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Clare Sloggett -- Python for Bioinformatics.
  • Two different problems can be solved with Python: One is bioinformatics itself, ie analysis, using libraries like biopython. The other is pipelining: automating analyses on HPC clusters in a way that makes them manageable even when there are many files and the analysis keeps changing.
• Lex Hider -- Salt: How to be truly lazy.
  • If you're too lazy to install, configure and run commands on your own servers: let Salt do it for you. Salt is an open source configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet but written in Python using ZeroMQ.

5 minute talks

• Bianca Gibson - Linux Australia update
  • linux.conf.au early bird registrations are open
  • miniconf overview
  • Linux Australia grants program

Monday 2nd September 2013, 6PM, Inspire 9: Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.

25 minute talks

• Richard Jones -- Don't do this!
  • In which Richard will tell you about some things you should never (probably ever) do to or in Python. Warranties may be voided.

• Ryan Kelly -- PyPy.js: towards a fast and compliant python shell for your browser

  • Ryan says: "This talk will highlight my experiments in porting PyPy to the web platform: the what, the how, and the why-on-earth-would-you-do-that."

5 minute talks

• Lars Yencken -- Show and Tell: The Great Language Game

Monday 5th August 2013

45 minute talk

• Highlights of PyCon AU 2013 -- Graeme, Richard, Tennessee, and anyone else who wants to contribute! (Please do...)

20 minute talk

• Why and how to upgrade to Python 3.3 with the "future" module -- Ed Schofield

Monday 1st July 2013

45 minute talks

• Python for big data analysis: Ed Schofield and Chris Boesch

15 minute talks

• Managing Scientific Simulations with Redis-Queue: Andrew Walker

Monday 3rd June 2013

15 minute talks

• Python one-liners: useful tools in a single line: Graeme Cross

Monday 6th May 2013

15 minute talks

• Nose of Yeti: A rspec-like testing DSL exploiting Python codecs - Stephen Moore
• Ansible: easy systems configuration and deployment with Python, yaml and ssh -- Javier Candeira

• Python Packaging for Production: Deploying python programs on Debian - Michael Cooper

Monday 1st April 2013

No, it was Easter Monday and April Fool's Day, but MPUG didn't happen.

Monday 4th March 2013

5 minute talk

• PyCon AU is coming - Everyone

• Python loves Dropbox - Stewart Haines
• How many ways are there to install a Python Package? - Andrew Walker

15 minute talks

• Boo! Not Python but Almost. - Loki Davison

Monday 5th November 2012

15 Minute Talks

• Hacking science with Ipython Notebook - Tennessee Leeuwenburg (sorry hardware fail on the arduino talk)
• Infrastructure as a service with Python, apache-libcloud and Rackspace or AWS - Javier Candeira

Monday 1st October 2012

5 minute talks

• What's New in Python 3.3 - Ryan

15 minute talks

Message Queueing from an MQ noob's perspective - Richard Jones

Monday 6th