Past Meetings • Recent Topics

How To Develop and Deploy Faster using Python APIs
(0:20:00 Minutes)
By: Paul
Experience Level: Intermediate

Building and deploying applications has never been easier, especially with the proliferation of APIs. In this talk, I will share the 4 concepts that will allow Python developers to quickly learn and use any Python-based API. The target audience for this talk are intermediate newbies who have a couple of projects under their belt.

Quick prototyping with redis-helper
(0:30:00 Minutes)
By: Kenneth Wade
Experience Level: Novice

In this talk, I will demonstrate some uses of https://pypi.python.org/pypi/redis-helper and how you can easily store, index, and modify Python dicts in Redis. Some asciinema demos are available at https://asciinema.org/~kenjyco

How I Taught My Dog To Text Selfies
(0:30:00 Minutes)
By: Greg Baugues
Experience Level: Novice

This talk is is for Python developers who would like to get started with hardware hacking but have been too intimidated in the past to do so. Also, it's for people who like dogs and/or selfies. Using a Raspberry Pi, Python, Twilio, and a big red button, I taught my dog to text selfies. In this talk, which features 25 minutes of live coding, we'll build the hardware hack from scratch. Developers will walk away knowing how to use Python to interact with Twilio and the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins. A video of this hack was featured on Mashable and was watched over 2.5M times.

Unsupervised machine learning in engineering and neuroscience: applications of ICA
(1:30:00 Minutes)
By: Mark V. Albert, Pavan Ramkumar, Anne Zhao, Jorge Yanar
Experience Level: Intermediate

This talk with be a set of four short presentations guiding everyone through three applications of unsupervised machine learning. We begin with the classic cocktail party problem - how to automatically separate mixed voices recorded by microphones - presented by Jorge Yanar. This will be followed by a brief, intuitive explanation of the algorithm used to perform the task - Independent Components Analysis (ICA) described by Professor Mark Albert. Dr. Pavan Ramkumar will demonstrate how the same technique is applied to filter unwanted noise during neural recordings using EEG, and Anne Zhao will end with a demonstration of how the same coding strategy has led to insights in how the brain encodes sensory information in the early auditory and visual systems. Her demo will allow participants to develop their own simulated neural codes for processing visual images. The brief talks will consist of a Jupyter notebook for running code and displaying results. For those who wish to run the examples during the talk, it will be necessary to install Jupyter running Python version 3 (the Anaconda Python distribution is recommended to set this up). Links and setup instructions will be given prior to the talks for people to follow along on their laptops and try the examples on their own if desired.

Mentorship Program Finals
By:

The largest ever cadre of ChiPy Mentorship participants meet to present their findings after 13 weeks of study with their mentors. You'll see demos and discussion for entry level projects, web development projects and data science experiments gone mad with the power of Python. Each presenter gets five minutes to tell the story of their journey and what they produced. Plus amazing prizes and announcements on how to apply for the spring term.

Python in the Classroom and at Sea
(0:15:00 Minutes)
By: Thane Richard

I was Ray's mentee during the summer of 2016. My project lets a player of Minecraft Pi 3D print an object they have built in the game. I will co-present this project with Peg Keiner, the Technology Director at GEMS World Academy in Chicago where my program was used in their elementary school classroom this Fall. I will also share some neat projects from my stint this Fall as a High School Marine Science teacher aboard the schooner Roseway during Ocean Classroom (worldoceanschool.org). I introduced students to Python and had them design and code a sensor kit with Raspberry Pi's to measure an aspect of the sailboat. The code is viewable on my github profile: https://github.com/thaneofcawdor.

Using pyodbc to execute SQL queries
(0:20:00 Minutes)
By: Anish Krishnan

How to access a database using pyodbc, and how to execute basic queries through Python.

Smuggling Snakes in a Box: A Docker + Python Love Story
(0:30:00 Minutes)
By: Hector Rios
Experience Level: Novice

Do you yearn? Have you ever tried to volunteer at a project but had an extremely difficult time trying to get everyone the right development environment? Do you ever work with a project that works in your computer but not in a server? Do you have a different dependency versions? (btw, that's kinda bad practice but don't fret, we gotchu) Yearn no more! With Docker, these things can be a thing of the past. Join in a brief, live coding session that will show you how to build a simple Bottle app and put it into a Docker container.

Module the Month: Turtle
(0:10:00 Minutes)
By: Chris Foresman

In keeping with the education theme, I thought I would give a talk on the Turtle module in Python, which is more or less a clone of Logo.

Introducing Python in an after school setting
(0:15:00 Minutes)
By: Kenneth Wade
Slides Link
I've lead a couple once-a-week, 10-week apprenticeships that allow 5th-8th grade students to explore the basics of Python through an interactive shell at their elementary school. The students primarily use lab computers, but they are also exposed to general command-line concepts through the use of several customized Linux laptops. In this talk I will discuss my goals for the students, the concepts that I introduce, how I interact with the students, some of the challenges that arise (for myself and the students), and some tips that may be helpful to other volunteers.

Migrating django application data
(0:25:00 Minutes)
By: Eevel Weezel

Discussion of common problems migrating Django application databases, particularly when switching DBMS.