"DNA is the programming language of the cell" - A computer science look at what this means, how the cell can "compute" and produce "output" that responds to the environment.

This will be a brief and humorous demonstration of DSON, a JSON-like serialization format in which the punctuation used to represent dictionaries and lists is replaced with words from one of 2014's most pervasive memes. https://dogeon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

YAML is a human-readable data serialization language that has taken the world by storm. We will explore features of the YAML syntax that will save keystrokes and clean up messy configuration files.

Challenges are fun, hands-on coding exercises covering a variety of topics -- such as pure problem solving, web development, and data science (see past challenges: https://github.com/chicagopython/CodingWorkshops). Participants will be assigned to teams of four, which will then have an hour to solve the problem at hand together. Teams are designed to have diverse experience levels, giving team members equal opportunity to learn and share ideas.

This is an open space to collaborate with others, ask questions, or help someone else if there's a question you can answer! No problem is too big or too small. If you're working on a personal project and looking for some Python help, or you want to join forces with someone who's working on an interesting idea, this option is for you.

Keep your Python applications alive and kicking with systemd.

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.

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.

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.