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.

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.

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.

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

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.

edx is a major django application serving huge numbers of students for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkely, and more. - A brief history of Computer-Based Instruction (python has a role); - incomplete survey of current open-source CBI; - edX: how's it different / what's it's rough structure, what (besides django/python) is involved; - edX: hacking the platform (django development); - edX: hacking courses; a deployment-level VM, and how to get started there; - finally: future topics: deployment; what this can't do (maybe) and why; - wrapup: call for interest & edx project night(s); I'll try to have some USBs for anyone who want to try one of the edX VMs during the talk

What you think Love is - is (probably) wrong. The correct metaphor / definition for live will make much more sense to the software person. In fact, it will help with team building and design too. Yup. Grab a beer. I'll tell you a story about how this evolved (turing machine example), how and where evolution selected it, and why it works - and how it works for approaching problems (design) too. Then I'll lay out the "api" (functional description). Don't take it too seriously. You couldn't have known. Now you will. Cheers!

Rackspace is rolling out a new service to allow your cloud to scale on its own, called Auto Scale. Built on Monitoring, Auto Scale allows you to grow or shrink your fleet of resources as demand changes. pyrax, a Python package for working with OpenStack-based clouds like Rackspace's, just released Auto Scale and Monitoring support with version 1.5.0. I'll show how you can use pyrax to deploy servers and automatically add or remove them based on their usage.