A couple of years ago, while taking a Web Development course in college, I had the freedom to choose which programming language and tools I wanted to learn web programming with. The only restriction we had was to make an application that met all the principles we had been learning in class. Together with my team, we decided to make a Multi-tier application with Django (Python) and a web data extraction (Web Scraping) app in Scala. Since then, I’ve enjoyed following the activity of the Python community.
Two years ago, I met a couple of Pythonista friends who have attended several Pycon US conferences and told me about their experiences with programmers, how they met Open Source figures openly, dining with them or even sharing a beer. That’s why this year, for the second consecutive time, I attended Pycon US. Pycon US this year was held in Montreal, Canada, which, despite not being in the United States, has a very united and participative community in organizing the event. Honestly, it was an excellent city for the event, which will also be the venue in 2015. I had the opportunity to talk to very interesting people, like some developers from CKAN, the Open Source project on which datamx.io is based, and other open data platforms like data.gov.uk and data.gov. Also, together with Ian Ward (@wardi), we organized an Open Space on Open Data and Open Government, where people from the US, Canada, and Australia participated. It was also interesting to see talks and sprints from other Open Source projects like Scrapy, IPython, Pandas, SciKit learn, Open Contracting Data Standard, among others, which are important for developing applications in the global Open Data ecosystem.
Python has always been characterized by being a very heterogeneous community and has done everything possible to reach new groups of developers and include new members. This year, 33% of the talks on the agenda were given by women, and as every year, PyLadies organized an auction to continue their program of integrating new users into Python programming. If you are a woman and are reading this post, I invite you to participate by doing “pip install pyladies” or check out this entry on the PyLadies blog so you can join this cause.
In this post, I would finally like to recommend some of the talks organized within the conference that can help you in your development as hacktivists. If you want to see more, go to PyVideo.org.
About our participation in the Open Contracting Data Standard Sprint, I’ll tell you more in the next post. Enjoy the videos.
Workshops
- Introduction to web and data scraping with Python
- Python for Social Scientists
- Search 101 an introduction to information retrieval
- How to formulate a science problem and analyze it with python
Talks