Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

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PyLadies Pune 2017 June meetup

Last weekend we had the PyLadies Pune June meet up. The day started with Shilpee Chamoli taking a data science 101 with Python. As few people were having trouble in installing Jupyter and the other dependencies, I suggested to use Azure notebooks, and a few of us did that. This was the first time I was attending a pandas workshop, even though I packaged it a few years back for Fedora. The simple problem related to Titanic data was fun to work on.

Next, Anwesha shared her experience in PyCon US, and she & Sayan also played the videos they recorded during PyCon. It was a surprise to all of the attendees. In the videos, we had messages from Lynn Root, Ewa Jodlowska, Carol Willing, and Jackie Kazil to the PyLadies Pune group members. Looking at the people's faces, I think that was a really good idea from Anwesha.

After lunch, we started discussing project ideas. Sayan, Praveen Kumar, Chandankumar and me were helping the groups about the ideas. I will be mentoring a group of students for their final year project, which is about a command line bookmarking application, with future features like a corresponding web-frontend etc. Right now, they are busy with the most difficult part of the project, choosing a name for the project :)

PyLadies Pune meetup, February 2017

TL;DR - It was a lot of fun.

This month’s PyLadies Pune meetup was held in reserved-bit, the new hackerspace in Pune. The microbits were sent by Ntoll, without his help this workshop was not possible.

The morning

Anwesha left home earlier so that she can join in from the beginning. I came in late, as I had to get Py (our 2 years old daughter) ready for the day. By the time I reached in the hackerspace, the rest of the participants were discussing PyCon Pune, and how are they going to represent PyLadies in the conference.

After having a large round of coffee, I started with setting up the laptops for Microbit development. That involved getting the latest Mu editor. I precached the binaries on my laptop and shared over the local network for faster access. We also had 3 people with Windows on the laptops, so we downloaded the device driver as explained in the Mu documentation. By this time we had 10 participants in the meetup.

Just when I started handing over the devices to each participant, I figured that I left the main pack of the devices back at home. Sayan ran back to our house and brought us the packet of Microbits. Meanwhile, all participants wrote a script to find out the groups of the current user in the Linux systems. We shared a group file for the Windows users.

Programming with Microbit

I spoke about the hardware and backstory for few minutes. Then we dived into the world of MicroPython. Everyone started scrolling their favorite message into the display. People also opened up the official documentation of the microbit-micropython project. They started exploring the API of their own. After a few fun trial and errors, we moved into the world of music, and speech. I never tried these two modules before. Everyone plugged their earphones into the microbits using the alligator-chip cables. We also learned about handling button presses, and people were experimenting all the things together.

In the last part of the workshop, I demoed the radio module. I think that was the most fun part of the whole day. People started sending out various messages and seeing them live on each other's devices. Siddhesh and Nisha went outside of the hackerspace to find till how far they can receive the messages. It seems these small devices can cover a large area. People had enough time to experiment on their own. Looking at the enjoyment at their faces, we could understand how much fun they were having. We are going to see more of this during the PyCon Pune devsprints.

January 2017 PyLadies Pune meetup

Like many of the previous PyLadies Pune meetups, I took a session in this month’s meetup too. System programming basics was the topic for my session. We did the session for around an hour, but as this month’s session also had a guest session over hangout, we could not go longer. We will do a full day workshop on the same topic in future.

Guest session from Paul Everitt

In his session, Paul wrote a very simple game using Arcade module in PyCharm. I relayed any doubts from the participants over chat to him, he responded to those in the live session. You can watch the recording of the full session on Youtube.

Paul had to wake up at 6:30 AM to take this session for us, so all of us were very happy and grateful that he did that for us.

This was the first time Anwesha could not attend the meetup due to Py’s health. We had around 28 people in the meetup, the highest till date.

Tommorow FOSSASIA meets PyLadies Pune

Tomorrow we have a special PyLadies meetup at the local Red Hat office. Hong Phuc Dang from FOSSASIA is coming down for a discussion with the PyLadies team here. She will be taking about various projects FOSSASIA is working on, including codeheat. In the second half I will be taking a workshop on creating command line shell using Python.

On Friday we will be moving to Belgaum, Karnataka, India. We will be participating in Science Hack Day India, the idea is to have fun along with school kids, and build something. Praveen Patil is leading the effort for this event.