PyLadies Pune at redhat.

I attended the PyLadies meetup yesterday at the redhat offices in Magarpatta City. TL; DR : It was an awesome bunch of people and a pretty interesting meetup.

For those of you who didn't know that a PyLadies chapter existed in Pune, follow them on twitter at - https://twitter.com/PyLadiesPune, join meetup and start following the meetup group at - https://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Pune/. The event is sponsored by Red Hat and they always happen at the Red Hat offices in Tower X, Magarpatta City, which is awesome for me because I stay/work 10 mins away.

It was supposed to start at 4:30 PM. Kushal Das, one of the organizers and speakers for the day, slowly started talking about the basics of systems programming using Python, starting with the os module and how it can be used to get the current working directory, to change the current working directory, to make new directories and get environment variables. Short on time, the systems programming talk ended fast.

The second talk was by Paul Everitt (https://twitter.com/paulweveritt) on Writing a Game, using PyCharm. It was a live coding session/talk, that happened via Hangouts/Youtube and was recorded. Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCjjV7iPwA&feature=youtu.be. I learnt something new from the talk and it was very well scripted, weaving the many features of PyCharm Community Edition (https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/) into the development process. If you are a professional software developer working with Python, you should definitely play around with PyCharm.

Finally, we wrapped up the day with a brief discussion of virtual environments and ideas/themes for future sessions. I didn't want to be vocal about my thoughts yet, especially given that it was my first session, but I feel very strongly in having scripted sessions, which each building on the last. Every session will have stand alone talks so that new comers don't feel left out. But, having a long series of talks centered on a theme, that span multiple sessions, is the best and only way to teach something substantial.

I volunteered to give talks at sessions. Going over the meetup, I think the best thing to talk about at my next meetup will be Virtual Environments and more, given the lack of knowledge from the participants. This way, I'll be able to squeeze in EDM (http://www.enthought.com/products/edm), which Enthought develops. Full disclosure, I work for Enthought.

I guess that's all for now. Until the next time ...

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