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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Keep your Python applications alive and kicking with systemd.

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.

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.

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!