Last night after the monthly APUG meeting, some of us had a nice conversation about presentations we'd like to see at APUG. This is a follow up email on the subject. Those of you on this email were the people who volunteered to be part of this discussion (plus Peter & Tipton) but if there is someone else you think should be involved then please reply-all and add them to the thread. There's a good change that I've transcribed an email or two wrong, so forgive me if I sent this more than once to correct bounces - please try to reply to the last one only so that everyone can see your comments.
The key idea in our discussion was that most of us are intermediate programmers on many Python topics, and experts on a few. For the many topics that each of are intermediate on, we could benefit from an APUG presentation; for the few topics that we are experts on, we could contribute to creating a presentation, and possibly present it.
The main value of this approach is that it could allow us to pick topics that maximize the value of the APUG meetup, and proactively seek out people to present on those topics, rather than just wait for people to volunteer to present, and accept whatever topic they wanted to present on. For what it's worth, I sensed that several people in the conversation would have happily volunteered to present on some of these topics.
I captured a list of the potential topics, and I'm going to reproduce (and expand) it here. It is a starting point, not an end, as I'm sure that there are things we missed and of course our priority between topics will change as we dig a little deeper.
Somebody suggested that we should create a Github/Gitlab issue tracker to allow us to have an ongoing group discussion on this, I will do this in the next day or two, and ask you all to get involved and contribute.
Somebody suggested that the presentations could be live coding, or Juypter notebooks, and we could try to make them available via git so that anyone could dig a little deeper on the day after the meetup on any topic that they found interesting. I think the people doing the work to prepare the material should decide the format used, but that we should try and apply experience & learning across presentations so that we as a group get better at doing them, with less effort over time.
And on to the topics we listed...
- Debugging / Linting / Winpdb
- Docker vs Virtualbox vs Ansible vs Saltstack
- Type safety (has changed a lot from Python 3.6 on)
- Lambda functions
- Functional programming
- DevOps
- Important to know Python libraries
- Pandas
- Flask
- Numpy
- TensorFlow
- Beautiful Soup
- Bokeh
- NLTK
- sklearn
- Mypy
- Black
- Matplotlib
- PyTest
- Click
- Pickling
- Machine Learning
- Testing / QA / Test automation / Selenium
- AWS / Ansible / Saltstack / Terraform
- Vagrant
- TravisCI / Circle CI / Jenkins
- Mathematics that programmers should know
- Magic methods / dunder methods
- Porting python2 to python3
- Intro to other languages worth knowing a little about
- GoLang
- R
- C / C++
- Node
- others?
- AsyncIO
- Cython
- How to help a beginner programmer
- Key python standard library things we all should know
- itertools
- lots of other examples
- we all could benefit from digging into corners of the standard library we haven't used
- Databases
- Intro to the most important ones sqllite / Postres / MySQL / NoSQL
- SQLAlchemy
- How to use if you haven't used before
- decorators / generators / partials / functools / async
- git, git beyond the basics
- virtualenv / venv / packaging
- How to contribute to an open source project
- Container myths
- Jupyter notebooks
- Documentation
- Continuous integration
- How to take your programming skills to the next level
Also, we should try to network with the organizers of other relatively large Austin meetups, and try to sent them some of our best presentations + presenters, and ask them to return the favor by sending us their best presentations. When someone does the work to put together a great presentation, they should get the reward of being able to give essentially the same presentation to multiple meetups.
Last night after the monthly APUG meeting, some of us had a nice conversation about presentations we'd like to see at APUG. This is a follow up email on the subject. Those of you on this email were the people who volunteered to be part of this discussion (plus Peter & Tipton) but if there is someone else you think should be involved then please reply-all and add them to the thread. There's a good change that I've transcribed an email or two wrong, so forgive me if I sent this more than once to correct bounces - please try to reply to the last one only so that everyone can see your comments.
The key idea in our discussion was that most of us are intermediate programmers on many Python topics, and experts on a few. For the many topics that each of are intermediate on, we could benefit from an APUG presentation; for the few topics that we are experts on, we could contribute to creating a presentation, and possibly present it.
The main value of this approach is that it could allow us to pick topics that maximize the value of the APUG meetup, and proactively seek out people to present on those topics, rather than just wait for people to volunteer to present, and accept whatever topic they wanted to present on. For what it's worth, I sensed that several people in the conversation would have happily volunteered to present on some of these topics.
I captured a list of the potential topics, and I'm going to reproduce (and expand) it here. It is a starting point, not an end, as I'm sure that there are things we missed and of course our priority between topics will change as we dig a little deeper.
Somebody suggested that we should create a Github/Gitlab issue tracker to allow us to have an ongoing group discussion on this, I will do this in the next day or two, and ask you all to get involved and contribute.
Somebody suggested that the presentations could be live coding, or Juypter notebooks, and we could try to make them available via git so that anyone could dig a little deeper on the day after the meetup on any topic that they found interesting. I think the people doing the work to prepare the material should decide the format used, but that we should try and apply experience & learning across presentations so that we as a group get better at doing them, with less effort over time.
And on to the topics we listed...
Also, we should try to network with the organizers of other relatively large Austin meetups, and try to sent them some of our best presentations + presenters, and ask them to return the favor by sending us their best presentations. When someone does the work to put together a great presentation, they should get the reward of being able to give essentially the same presentation to multiple meetups.