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.

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.

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.

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.

measure_it provides timing and counting for iterators (and other code segments). https://measure_it.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

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.

Recap of last weeks PyData conference in NYC.

A lighting talk introducing Pandas, a library for data manipulating and overall munging goodness. If you do stuff with data and you don't use Pandas, you're doing it all wrong.

How to begin rendering data with D3, by way of a simple python web server.