Katie Simmons, a data engineer at ActiveCampaign, will speak about the challenges and benefits of using Airflow for ETL at a rapidly growing company. ActiveCampaign has many thousands of databases - some including tables with up to a trillion rows - several APIs and new source requests coming in every week. This lightning talk will be an overview of using Airflow to extract, load and transform that data into our data lake so that it can be used for Business Intelligence and Data Science.

One of the most common languages used by Python developers is some shell script (sh, bash, cmd.exe, or PowerShell), but why torture yourself with poor design decisions from the 70s when you know Python?

I first encountered SQLAlchemy several years ago. I didn't get it. It seemed every line I attempted to write would drop me into 50 tabs of labarynthine documentation. Why do we have the ORM *and* Core? Should I build my tables as `Table` instances or should I be extending `Base`? How is `Base` more declarative than a function that returns `Table`s?? Can I please just write SQL??? :sob: I'm still hesitant to peek too far behind the curtain, but I do think I've finally wrapped my head around the philosophical underpinnings of the library and the different problems SQLAlchemy allows us to solve. After all, who among us works with databases that aren't problems in and of themselves?

Failure can be scary. There are real costs to a company and its users when software crashes, models are inaccurate, or when systems go down. The emotional stakes feel high-- no one wants to be responsible for a failure. We can lower the stakes by creating spaces to learn from failures, and minimize their impact. This talk introduces two ways to address failure: blameless post-mortems, to learn from an incident; and pre-mortems, to identify modes of failure upfront.

Daily fantasy sports has become a booming industry. One leader in the space is Fanduel who after raising $275 million in their series E funding, brought their valuation to over $1 billion. As the popularity of daily fantasy sports has taken off, critics have argued that success is the result of luck; yet the consistent success of a select group of players would suggest that success can be driven by skill. This talk, will go over how one could use Python to level the playing field.

An overview of Strata Data Science and python use cases inside the company.

Not all data is easily accessible. Taking info from a website that requires authentication, interaction, or even just to load a fancy script. This talk will discuss using Selenium to level up your web scraping skills, with examples and suggested practices.

From its founding by Lorena Mesa in 2015 until now, the Chicago PyLadies chapter has evolved into a strong presence by the help of many passionate organizers and fellow tech community partners. In this talk, we will take a look at Chicago PyLadies history, partnerships, and how our future is actively being shaped by our global PyLadies.

In 2019, the PSF released its first Annual Impact Report. This report details the financial standing of the PSF. Additionally, the report describes how funds we receive support various PSF programs. During this talk we will go through the data and discuss upcoming programs the PSF will be funding.

In fulfilling the mission of the Python Software Foundation, infrastructure to support the development, use, and promotion of the language has seen steady investment. We'll take a stroll through the services that the PSF currently supports, the history and current state, as well as a brief introduction to future initiatives. No experience or prior knowledge is needed!