RECENT TOPICS

Selenium: Doing Magic with Websites Using Python By: Seth Weidman
Date: Aug. 10, 2017, 6 p.m.
Selenium is an excellent package that lets you dynamically interact with websites right from your Jupyter Notebook. At Metis, we teach Selenium early in our bootcamp. We have a great Selenium tutorial that involves lets you make a reservation on OpenTable using Python. In addition, several students have already completed excellent projects using Selenium. During this talk, Seth Weidman, a Senior Data Science Instructor at Metis, as well as the following two current Metis students [TO BE DETERMINED] will be presenting the projects that they just completed.
Fortune-Telling with Python: An Intro to Time Series Modeling By: Jonathan Balaban
Date: Aug. 10, 2017, 6 p.m.

Description: a pythonic tour of time series methodologies and packages, including ARIMA, seasonal models, and Markov approaches. Intermediate level with basic statistics and time data familiarity required. Bio: Jonathan Balaban is a senior data scientist, strategy consultant, and entrepreneur with ten years of private, public, and philanthropic experience. He currently teaches business professionals and leaders the art of impact-focused, practical data science at Metis.

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Tracking FCC bots with Python By: Chris Sinchok
Date: Aug. 10, 2017, 6 p.m.

I've been doing a bunch of analysis on the recent FCC public comments in Python (https://medium.com/@csinchok/an-analysis-of-the-anti-title-ii-bots-463f184829bc). Due to this work, I was quoted in Gizmodo, Ars Technica, and the BBC. I'd like to talk about how I approached this problem, how Python helped make sense of my findings, and what my conclusions are.

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Python for Home-Ec By: Adam Forsyth
Date: June 8, 2017, 6 p.m.

Have you ever tried to make something with scrap wood, and wondered how to use it optimally? Do have a bunch of pickles and jams you made, and you want to eat them in an order that maximizes variety? These are real problems a co-worker of mine had, and we used Python to solve them. I'll show the data we started with, the solutions we came up with, and a bit of the computer science behind them. See some examples of how to think through problems and design your own algorithms to solve them.

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A Gentle Introduction to Context Managers By: Aly Sivji
Date: June 8, 2017, 6 p.m.

We've all used context managers provided by the Python Standard Library to read from/write to a file. Have you ever wondered what was happening underneath the hood when you used a with statement? This talk will explore context managers, discuss various use cases, and show you how to implement a context manager to manage MongoDB connections.

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Letsencrypt with Python Webapps By: Joe Jasinski
Date: May 11, 2017, 6 p.m.
In-browser encryption is more important now than ever. When building modern web-apps, encryption is a necessity. This talk will detail how you can secure your Python-based projects with Letsencrypt, a free certificate authority available to anyone. It will cover the Python-based tools available to configure Letsencrypt and an example project utilizing it.
Python for mathematical visualization: a four-dimensional case study By: David Dumas
Date: May 11, 2017, 6 p.m.
This is a talk about creating pictures of a mathematical object---specifically, a 4-dimensional fractal "dust" that has been the subject of mathematical research in hyperbolic geometry since the 1980s. In the end this is accomplished using a little algebra, a little geometry, and a healthy dose of Python. That is, I will present a case study of using Python in several aspects of a mathematical visualization project, from the computation itself, to transforming and converting data, and finally for scripting the process of generating the images. Along the way I'll explain how Python's convenient idioms and containers (e.g. sets and set comprehensions) are a good fit for some of the algebraic and geometric questions that come up, how Scipy and Numpy enable fast numerical calculations, and how Python's strength as a language for scripting and automation allows easy orchestration of rendering of still images and frames of animations. The mathematical visualization project we describe is a collaboration with François Guéritaud (Université de Lille).
Build a Game: HTML5 sockets + Phaser + flask
Date: May 11, 2017, 6 p.m.
Brian will show how to use flask and Python to power a browser based HTML5 game over sockets. Events can be pushed to the browser or pushed to flask from the browser. Great starter for those who are interested in event driven programming.
Grok the GIL: Write Fast And Thread-Safe Python By: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
Date: April 13, 2017, 8 p.m.
This is a sneak preview of a talk accepted to PyCon 2017, this June in Portland. A. Jesse Jiryu Davis is a prominent open source developer who has spoken at the last three PyCons, so this talk promises to be thorough, technical, and fun. He describes the talk thus: "I wrote Python for years while holding mistaken notions about the Global Interpreter Lock, and I've met others in the same boat. The GIL's effect is simply this: only one thread can execute Python code at a time, while N other threads sleep or await network I/O. Let's read CPython interpreter source and try some examples to grok the GIL, and learn to write fast and thread-safe Python." Jesse is a Staff Engineer at MongoDB in New York City specializing in C, Python, and async. Lead developer of the MongoDB C Driver libraries libbson and libmongoc. Author of Motor, an async MongoDB driver for Tornado and asyncio. Contributor to Python, PyMongo, MongoDB, Tornado, and asyncio. Co-author with Guido van Rossum of "A Web Crawler With asyncio Coroutines", a chapter in the "500 Lines or Less" book in the Architecture of Open Source Applications series.
TDD with PyTest By: Sand Ip
Date: April 13, 2017, 7:45 p.m.
PyTest helps Python developers with test-driven development, continuous integration, and quality engineering. In this talk we’ll cover setup, data fixtures, case types, and results interpretation by walking through a PyTest demo.