Brian will talk about his experiences using Python and NLTK http://nltk.org/ to run language comparisons to generate lexical difference graphs like the one mentioned in the "Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe" article. http://bit.ly/1cS46Ba The focus will be on the NLTK and how its internals work to process a language. This talk will be his best one ever.

Reference counting is very useful but it has an odd problem. We employ a technique from graphs to approach it. The solution works but it's a bit slow.

Pandas is the data-munging Swiss Army knife of the Python world. Often you know how your data should look but it's not so obvious how to get there, so I'll present a visual approach to learning the library and data manipulation.

Braintree needs to be highly available and secure, while still maintaining a rapid development pace and strict backwards compatibility. In order to achieve that, we use what has become known as the "Chicago Process". This involves pairing, strict TDD, a team structure, and weekly iterations, all to empower the devs to make decisions and get work of a high quality done while avoiding siloing.

A walking tour of Storm, what it is, what you can do, and how you can use it with python.

Many python programmers showed up to participate in the Chicago #aaronswhack. Here's a list of what they worked on, and here are pointers to local projects as well as worldwide projects.

Open Source Hardware is going to change the world. But the hardware is still going to need software to control it. Can Python take the lead and become the de facto language of open source hardware control? Paul Ebreo talks about the three keys to Python's success in open hardware.

In this talk, I will present on a slice of the maker movement called "civic making" and a new space that has opened up in Chicago to encourage this type creation, CivicLab. As an example of "civic making" I will discuss Between the Bars, a paper based blogging platform for those who are incarcerated, built in Django. I will also discuss our choice in framework and the pros/cons of our approach.

Monoids are largely badly explained, but actually quite beautiful. I would like to take a brief tour of what a monoid is and how they can help out with mundane every day tasks in python.

Recap of last weeks PyData conference in NYC.