Meeting Notes 2013-09-18

Sep 18, 2013 • Jess Hamrick


This was the first meeting of py4science, and was primarily organizational.

Attendance

12 attendees, with an experience breakdown of:

  • Experienced: 6
  • New: 3
  • Intermediate: 3

People came from a variety of different departments and organizations as well:

  • Helen Wills
  • Redwood Center
  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology
  • Nuclear engineering
  • IPython
  • Astronomy
  • I School

Meeting topics

Newbie nuggets

  • Each meeting will start with approximately 20 minutes for a “newbie nugget”, which is a brief overview of some introductory topic.

  • Newbie nuggets should be written up in IPython notebooks, so they can be archived and referred to

  • Cindee went through two example nuggets on the glob library and list comprehensions

  • Working groups
    1. Python for data analysis on Fridays 12-2pm, in D-Lab (Bob Bell)
    2. Text analysis on Fridays 2-4pm in D-Lab
  • There will probably be more Python Fundamentals courses

Advanced topics for lightning talks

What do people want to hear about?

  • Test-driven development (resources, getting into the habit of test-driven development)
  • Using virtual environments
  • Parallel computing (theano, and just parallelization in general)
  • Pandas workflow
  • IPython: new and upcoming features, tips and tricks
  • How to work on the bleeding edge of an environment
  • Maintaining packages
  • pytables
  • Writing documentation
  • Cython
  • Python 3
  • Development tools: editors, version control, pylint, etc.
  • scikits (especially scikit-learn)
  • statsmodels
  • RPy
  • Javascript, D3
  • Pyglet
  • Starcluster (for managing amazon ec2 clusters)
  • networkx
  • Package managment (pip, easy_install, anaconda, enthought, wheels, etc…)
  • Panda3D

Publicity

How do we get the word out about this meeting to people? What is the best way to have a collaborative sharing environment?

  • py4science mailing list (please forward to other lists, too!)
  • google calendar that sits on the website, can be imported (this has now been created and can be found here
  • py4science list name is not on the website, there should be a link that takes you to the page to add yourself. We should also include this in the emails.
  • py4science twitter feed?
  • we should put the exact room number on the invitation emails/website

Misc

  • Open to more people besides Berkeley, e.g. industry
  • If we want pizza, we can set up a collection and ask different people to bring food each meeting. D-Lab will reimburse for small amounts of food.
  • Information about the old py4science can be found here

Future meetings

  • Meetings are every other week, may change to every week if there’s enough content

  • Next meeting is in two weeks 10/02/2013
    • Cindee will do the newbie nugget
    • Lightning talks on advanced topics (~20 minutes each)
      • Python 3 (Thomas)
      • New stuff in IPython (Min)
  • The following meeting: editor extravaganza!