Past Meetings • Recent Topics

Advent of Code
(5 Minutes)
By: Sree P
Experience Level: Novice

Breif overview of “Advent Of Code” and walkthrough of one of the challenges

Three Python Nuances I Wish I'd Known Earlier
(10 Minutes)
By: Jess Unrein
Experience Level: Novice

I'll briefly go over three Python gotchas that have given me headaches in the past that I wish I had known about earlier. We'll talk about how lists store references to objects, why default mutable arguments are unexpectedly tricky, and the difference "is" and "==" comparators.

Staying alive with systemd
(30 Minutes)
By: Siva Manivannan
Experience Level: Intermediate

Keep your Python applications alive and kicking with systemd.

What's the deal with Florida's news?
(5 Minutes)
By: Jordan Nelson
Experience Level: Novice

When thinking about Florida News many have heard of the ubiquitous Florida man. This talk will look at news from around the country and attempt to quantify if Florida man truly exists. I used Python to build functions that scrape satirical, national, and local news sites and built a basic model to compare news across various states. Python libraries highlighted in this talk include: requests, Beautiful Soup, and sklearn.

Busy-Beaver: Increasing Community Engagement with Python
(15 Minutes)
By: Aly Sivji, Chris Luedtke
Experience Level: Novice
Slides Link
With over four thousand members, the Chicago Python Users Group is one of the largest Python communities in the world. Slack has become the primary method of communication amongst members in-between events. We developed an open-source Slack bot, codename: Busy Beaver, to increase member engagement. This talk will introduce Busy Beaver, provide a high-level walkthrough of its architecture and code, and discuss the future roadmap of the project.

Python in a Pod in a Kube in a Pi
(30 Minutes)
By: Joe Jasinski
Experience Level: Intermediate

Have some extra Raspberry Pi's laying around? Ever want to learn what this Kubernetes thing is about? Do you love running Python inside of Docker? Then this talk is for you! This talk will dive into some core Kubernetes concepts, using a Raspberry Pi cluster as a learning tool.

Beating Mastermind: Winning Games, Translating Math to Code, and Learning from Donald Knuth
(35 Minutes)
By: Adam Forsyth
Experience Level: Novice

Mastermind is a logic-based guessing game. Many years ago, Donald Knuth described a way to win the game in 5 moves or less. We’ll implement the game and the algorithm from the article. Come learn how to beat Mastermind and turn a paper by a famous scientist into code!

From Python to Rust
(15 Minutes)
By: Kevin Nasto
Experience Level: Intermediate

Ever been curious about the Rust programming language? Although Rust is a low level language, some similarities exist with Python. This talk describes it from the point of view of a Python user. Discover the alternatives to pip, functions and passing values, lists, classes, import statements, exception handling, and more.

Why Learn PySpark?
(30 Minutes)
By: David Liao
Experience Level: Novice

Grubhub has chosen to adopt the Spark Big Data computing framework to underpin it’s internal Grubhub Data Platform Spark was adopted very early by Silicon Valley FANG companies.. What features make Spark a great computing platform for both Analytical reporting and Machine Learning? Tips on how to install PySpark on a Mac OSX system so one can play wit PySpark without paying for a cloud cluster

Tour of job scheduling in Python
(30 Minutes)
By: Raymond Buhr
Experience Level: Novice

Once you've started to learn python, you're going to want to use it to automate tasks. Their are lots of ways to do this, each with it's own set of pros and cons. This talk will go over a few options for scheduling the execution of python scripts and the tradeoffs that come with each. Tools that will be covered include crontab, schedule, celery, airflow, and cloud options AWS Lambda and GCP functions.

Defining services with grpc and protocol buffers
(25 Minutes)
By: Patrick Boland
Experience Level: Intermediate

gRPC and protocol buffers offer a high performance, open source way to define services and messages for the future. Think of it like REST, but for the http2 protocol.

How to install Anaconda
(5 Minutes)
By: Kevin Nasto
Experience Level: Novice

Ever want to avoid installing Python packages with complex dependencies such as sklearn? Ever have permissions issues installing a package? Anaconda is the answer. This talk describes why use it and how to get it set up.

Machine Learning and Deduplication
(30 Minutes)
By: Forest Gregg
Experience Level: Intermediate

Machine learning and record linkage: Finding duplicates or matching data when you don't have primary keys is one of the biggest challenges in preparing data for data science. At DataMade we have built a python, open source machine learning library to help developers, and a product Dedupe.io to help everyone else. We describe the problem and how we use machine learning to scale to tens of millions of records.

Why python is the best first programming language and here is how to make it even better
(15 Minutes)
By: Jhankar Mahbub
Experience Level: Novice

Meet Simon! He doesn't have a technology background, but he wants to be a programmer. Should he go to a boot camp with 17k or read 29,900,000 options provided by Google when he searched "Learn Python". Or he can join ChiPy mentorship program. While all of these will work, I would like to make his journey bit more enjoyable by presenting a more natural, friendlier, and a more interactive way to learn programming concepts. In this talk, we will look at functions, for loops, list comprehensions, and generators in a way that is easy for people like Simon to understand and use.