PyDelhi Blog

PyDelhi Devsprint at 91,Springboard,Noida

2019-02-02T12:00:00+05:30

INTRODUCTION

THE SECRET TO GETTING AHEAD IS GETTING STARTED is the line, one should always remember.

If you have started your programming journey recently, then you are at the right place read the blog for further insight. So, I have just started with my journey in technology(programming) and attended the DEVSPRINT organized by Pydelhi at 91, Springboard. This was my very first Pydelhi meetup and I am glad that I went ahead and attended it. If you are thinking what DEVSPRINT is read the next line carefully:

Dev-Sprints are meetups organised by PyDelhi for contributors, maintainers, and authors to meet under one roof and contribute to Open source projects. This is beginner friendly so anyone wanna start journey in Open Source can join the next one.

DEVSPRINT

The session started by introduction from everyone. Then the project mentors pitch about their projects that what are the prerequisite for contributions and other required details.

1.Piyush Aggarwal(a.k.a brute4s99) briefed us about Pandas - an open-source Python Library providing high-performance data manipulation and analysis tool using its powerful data structures. Python with Pandas is used in a wide range of fields including academic and commercial domains including finance, economics, Statistics, analytics, etc.He walked the attendees through the repository and requested interested attendees to contribute to the project on github.

2.Akkshay Arora(a.k.a Quanon) explained about KIVY and ELECTRUM. Kivy being an Open source Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps. Electrum on the other hand is fast, secure and easy to use. It suits the needs of a wide spectrum of users. Electrum verifies that your transactions are in the Bitcoin blockchain. Because about trust,It is about freedom and independence. He also briefed us about the documentation regarding both and those who were interested in either of the two could contribute.

3.As there were many beginners in the DevSprint so, Rajat Saini(a.k.a rajataaron) and Shashank Kumar(a.k.a realslimshanky) decided to take a session on Introduction to git and Github. Since I am a beginner and wanted to go on a slow pace so I learned about the basics of git and github. They taught git in such a proper manner that all my queries regarding it was solved. They explained each and every topic so deeply that each and every doubt and basics were cleared. We further implemented all the topics we learned and it was legit 'eureka' moment for me when i pulled out my very first successful request.

It was also told that if, any of the participants is able to make a valid contribution successfully, she would receive stickers or a pen drive from their respective mentors. The meetup concluded with report from the mentors, feedback from the attendees and some fruitful discussions on what to pursue in future and regarding the latest trends and technologies. This was indeed the most eventful informative meetup i have ever been to. With like minded people having great experiences and ready to help you at any moment. Such type of events and activities only helps the community of developers to grow and also helps you grow as a person.
Vibhu Agarwal, a first-time contributor was able to make a successful contribution to pandas, which can be reviewed here.

As the day came to its conclusion, we ended up with a better understanding of Open source and some sense of self satisfaction. I am looking forward to attend the future events till then signing off.

Happy Coding!

PyDelhi Anniversary Meetup at Microsoft Gurugram

2019-01-12T00:00:00+05:30

This time the meetup had something special to give. The 12/Jan/2019 meetup was not regular meetup it was a combined PyDelhi and Blockchain Devs anniversary meetup. The meetup was hosted in Microsoft Gurugram. Since This also was meetup was hosted in collaboration of four different communities i.e PyDelhi, BlockchainDevs, Open-Source-Networking-user-group This time around the meetup kicked off with the introduction of pydelhi and blockchain developer groups, the roadmap for the future and the past achievements were recalled where they elaborated about the future events. Demands of ideas for future events, suggestions and volunteers also raised there.

Then talk on "Assistive tech for the blind in python" was given by Dinesh Kaushal NVDA. where he mentioned the possible ways and solutions for the tech for visually impaired people, After which he presented the proposal for the people who were interested in contributing to the project.

After the first few talks, we were asked to have a Break and Networking Session, which was really fun.

After which Arif Khan gave a very informative talk on edge computing, where he discussed the future with edge computing and the differences between cloud computing and edge computing.This experience in the industry and an informative slide helps us to understand the topic lot more.

After a quick coffee break, Vipin Rathi took a talk on the network technologies involved in edge computing the future scope of 5g technology and how it will affect the aspects of edge computing after which he also discussed the aspects of the blockchain.

The last talk was presented by Abhimanyu Bhaater in which he describes L2 Switches in brief which was elaborated precisely.

Volunteers meet was followed by hiring and pitching session where as usual everyone who all are looking for internships or jobs pitched for themselves. As this list will be posted on the community mailing list Link and LinkedIn. In the volunteer meet those who were willing to volunteer for Pydelhi were told about the responsibilites and area where they can help the community.

We ended our special anniversary meetup with cake cutting ceremony which was flagged off with 8th -grade students. Having such youngsters in these meet-ups is really inspiring. Having a delicious cake in hand and like-minded funny and happy people all around made this meetup real success.

We as a community honestly want and hope for more and more participation in our meetups. It was a great working effort of all the communities to make this meetup a real success.

Anniversary-Special Meetup

Written by - Kaushlendra Pratap

PyDelhi+ILUG-D meetup at Broctagon solutions Noida

2018-11-10T11:00:00+05:30

Devsprints with coala

At today’s dev sprint the newcomers not only learned about the open source community like Coala but also got the hands-on on to how to start contributing to open source. The talk was taken over by Kilari Teja, a software developer at Viper development and a GSoC’18 intern at Coala.

In today’s talk about contributing to open source, we came across the topic of code linting which is referred to tools that analyses code to flag programming error and that's how we came across Coala.

Coala is a free and open-source language-independent analysis toolkit, written in Python. Coala basically checks for the errors in the code and corrects most of them automatically and flag the others which it cannot for manual correction.

We started on Coala by setting up the virtualenv in our machines and then with the help of Teja and the Coala guide we were able to install and run Coala on our systems.

Learned step by step how to run coala and check for errors and auto correct them. Created a custom Coala file to make it run across a project of our own as a task given by the mentor.

Started with an introduction to the community and how it works, the mentors didn't break a sweat as the whole session went on for 4 hours including giving hands-on on the code base and solving the sample issues.

My Experience with ILUG-D on Debian package creation

Debian is open source, totally distributed developed, community-based distribution of Linux OS and being part of this community is one of the goosebump feeling one could have. Here I am putting how I went from a normal Debian user to go ahead with the first step into its development.

It was my first PyDelhi meetup cum dev sprints and I was totally clueless while entering at the venue. But I had experience of support from my Pycon India where 100s of developers and volunteers made me feel awesome as it was quite welcoming to be with them. I have hope for the same today as well and it went out more than my expectation.

Started with introduction round, we all had quite friendly and light mood hi hello with each other and since most attendees were students and that too working on any current and trending technology, I felt great already seeing all of them here.

We collected our tasks on various topics ranging from coala, to open source collaboration to creating Debian package on Linux. Since Linux is love for me, I, of course, choose to go for Debian package creation group and we got introduced to Rajudev. Rajudev was our mentor for the session and he came out quite great on it.

What I have covered

Docker, one of most awaited tech which I was desperate to start, got sudden chance to just use it on my mac to create a Debian distribution for package creation.

Manas, a college guy and one of Active volunteer helped me understanding docker setup while preparing our system for the task. On each step, everyone could feel free to ask from a mentor and we keep going on it.

We choose 2-3 different package which we had to pack for Debian, I did for pretty-ms.

And we went for everything, from setting up our Debian OS to installing all packager and installer, git, and pretty much everything.

While our mentor was continuously on us for each small and big questions, I felt like wow moment when I could finally see my deb file created after I had done with all commands.

We could not finish pushing package on apt thing due to most of the time went in discussion and problem hunting of everyone while creating the package, but I felt session as too satisfying and quite great to boost morale for further development into it.

We had some fruitful community discussion and further planning on it as we approached evening time. I manage to get out of the box and mixed up with some blockchain and ML developers and put all my questions and had the satisfying discussion with them, and now the time came for the group pic.

We ended with cheers on the face and some feeling of contribution for software community which we are consuming almost every time. Till the next time, happy coding.

PyDelhi meetup at FUELED NOIDA

2018-09-29T11:00:00+05:30

So the machine learning themed pydelhi meetup kicked off with Vishal (https://github.com/vishalsangwan) giving a talk on OpenCV and facial recognition. Vishal started off with first clearing some basics about video and image capturing where he talked about how a computer handles video input. He uses OpenCV to take in video input using his laptop camera. Afterwards he uses facial recognition datasets to track faces in his video input using his Rasberry pi and tried out different datasets.

Then there was a quick lightning talk given by Raju.

Then we broke for snacks and networking involving a very intense foosball competition.

The Second Talk was given by Praneet Nigam(https://github.com/Praneet460) following on the Machine Learning Train by giving a talk on Matplotlib, Seaborn and Pandas where he showcased some ways to data filtering and classification. Praneet Used a Pokemon dataset where he evaluated features of his pokemon dataset which included the height, weight and type of pokemeon. all required data for the talk can be found here.(https://github.com/Praneet460/DataVisualizationPyDelhi).

We ended our machine learning themed meetup with community mixer and hiring pitches.

Until next time, Au revoir

A skeptic to a believer

2018-09-01T12:00:00+05:30

Meeting location was E2E Networks office

It's a saturday and it's raining. When the whole city is drowning, i am scaling the seas to reach pyDelhi at my own office. Yes, i am an employee at E2E Networks and i was recommended to attend pyDelhi by a senior at the company who is also an active member of the pyDelhi community.

As a young lone wolf passionate about software development, i could never register the idea of random people meeting with a common love - Python. Never the less, i did make it to the event. I see that the space is already packed with people with eyes glimmering. Glimmering with a sense of pride to be associated with the collective enthusiasm towards building something awesome using Python.

I occupy a backseat, waiting for the first talk. A few minutes and some introductions down the line, it starts. It's a talk on Django Rest Framework and how to do CRUD APIs in 20 mins. An honest tech me is not thrilled being an active django developer but then i realise that it is being delivered by a college student. It slowly sinks in that even the audience has many college students. Fair enough, says the skeptic me, this event sure is beneficial to college students. Now the professional me is questioning the utility.

Soon after, my senior delivers an awesome talk on django on day 500. It is not technical detail but philosophy regarding end delivery when both application and the team size grow. It captures me. I want to shout out that i relate but i hold. As the talk concludes, professional me feels content. The thought provoking nature of the talk has enriched me somehow. A skeptic is not so skeptic anymore. But am i owned?, certainly not.

It's time for flash talks. Well what? Anybody can come up and speak about anything for 10 mins. That's strangely empowering. I do question the volunteers again, anything at all you say? The reply is a yes. So i commit to delivering one.

My talk is to follow after another talk on how to contribute to open source. It is a good talk and an anxious me has listened to it quite thoroughly. Anxious, because the talk i propose is something that is close to my heart. It is my startup idea that i had pursued quite passionately for 2 years of my college life. As my thoughts about contributing to open source and my own talk muddle together, it is already time for me to take the podium. I don't even realise that another talk has taken place which is about the success stories of python.

I connect the HDMI and i put up the pitch deck on the 55 inch display. As soon as i see it, i am lost in nostalagia. I deliver the same pitch i had through and through to an audience who is looking hopeful to hear something enriching. Questions are raised, answers are given and it concludes in an applaud from everyone in the room. To get a platform to share my journey is enchanting. The skeptic me is melting at this point. The believer has arisen.

pyDelhi is not only a platform for a display of tech interests but a platform that empowers you. It provides you a platform to meet like-minded people, find a job or find people to hire. Maybe you'll find a startup idea or a founder to kickstart your own. But you will most certainly find belief in how community can enrich you. So, my fellow reader, i hope to see you at the next.

FOSS mega meetup at Adobe Noida

2018-08-08T12:00:00+05:30

Meeting location was Adobe's Sector 25 A office

A monster structure enhanced with striking colours, surrounded with the strength of dull dark in the center. It resembled an incredible place for a super meetup like this one. Not just venue, Adobe likewise gave us incredible quality food and snacks. Not once but thrice. What's more, the staff from Adobe, was extremely courteous to us. Thanks Adobe India for hosting us again!

After registration as I entered the hall , introduction session were going on. The fun intro or you can call it as an ice breaking session was followed by the first talk was by Ashutosh Kumar Singh. The talk was about how to learn efficiently. With great ease he explained that sitting in a classroom tuning in to a teacher has a craving for getting the hang of… Reading a book on another subject has a craving for adapting… but since they are overpowering detached exercises, they are wasteful. It is far more terrible than wasteful, it is counterproductive in light of the fact that it gives you the false impression that you know the material. He also subdivided learning and stages of learning in different parts/topics.

This efficient learning talk was followed by a coffee break which was very refreshing.

Second in line was Hina Watts on concurrent programming using Akka. She made a pressing point that sometimes java programs which run till EOF have longer runtime than creating the program. Even though thread can be an approach to solve many problems but threads always seemed really complex to me. Doing the assignments with increasing complexity it will be very difficult to maintain the code. Here the actors in java come into play. She also threw some light on the capability of akka to work in distributed environment. The session was quite informative.

After Hina’s talk a panel discussion on how companies can collaborate with open source and can generate revenue. Companies that contribute to an open source project get to know the technology at a much deeper level than they would by "simply" using the technology.

Following by the panel discussion the members had mouth watery lunch by adobe. After lunch we gathered in the main hall to attend a Panel discussions on how to collaborate with different Free and Open source communities. They discussed how you as an individual can join an open source club. How you can contribute to the open source world , generating revenue with the open source communities. These discussions were quite motivating.

The meetup was marked close by a the Lightning Talks. It was more of an idea sharing session, then showdown of skills. As you all know, in lightening talks, people from the audience are given five minutes to talk and present whatever idea they have.

The best part of Mega meetups like these is networking that is, you get to know new people , the positions they hold and their skillset. Personally what I think, networking, communicating, telling a bunch of people about yourself, your skills ,achievements boosts your confidence and reciprocating skills. You make new contacts, links which is definitely beneficial for you in a long run.

We honestly want and hope for more and more participation in our meetups and the whole tech world. With that, we came to the end of another meetup. But before we sign off, let me thank all those communities, other than PyDelhi, because of whom this all could become possible:

**Indian Linux User Group Delh**i

**Facebook Developer Circle Delhi NC**R

**PyLadies Delh**i

**Linux Chix Indi**a

**Blockchain De**v

**Hyperledger Delh**i

**Mozilla Delhi Open Communit**y

It was great working in a joint effort with every one of these communities.PyDelhi needs to express profound gratitude to them for getting together for this meetup and envision working with them again in future.

PyDelhi Meetup at Microsoft, Gurugram

2018-07-10T00:00:00+05:30

Introductions

By the time of Introductions, the hall was almost full with around 100 attendees ready to share a word about them with everyone. Rajat and Gourav passed the mic around the hall till everyone finished their introductions.

Vim or Sublime or PyCharm. Battle of the IDE's

A great way to begin the meetup was allow folks to join a debate on which IDE was better or is it the simplicity of a text editor with few plugins which make all the difference. Akshay invited the panel to the stage and also folks from the audience who ever wanted to share their experience or brag about their favorite tool of trade. It almost felt like a Messi vs Ronaldo situation where folks with 5, 10+ years experience embrasing their professional IDE like PyCharm. On the other hand, those of new age like to experiment with light and memory friendly tools like Sublime. The conclusion of such a conversation cannot be obtained which can be accepted by everyone as likability of a tool is a relative. What ever rows your boat, right!

Lunch

Lunching Scenes

Thanks to Microsoft we had lunch and a cool place to network while during the break before the talk sessions took place. It's always great to catchup with peers and meet new folks.

Becoming a multilingual superhero in Django

Sanyam Khurana proposed this talk for PyCon India 2018 and as a process of getting valuable feedback decided to deliver the same during PyDelhi. The talk is a culmation of his experiences while trying to make Django aware of different languages and adaptive to user's language preference. This idea helps localization of web applications to support various languages with help of Django. He began with explaining the prerequisites and important configuration changes in Django. Then he explained what are the different ways in which a second language can be supported like dynamic/static content. Moving on, he explained how he managed to modify templates and models and finally save the translations in static file and deliver when needed after compilation. Interesting parts of his talk was when he shared 'Gochas' which were tricky situations while in development he solved.

PyCon India 2018 Proposal - Becoming a multilingual superhero in Django

Keeping your Dotfiles in check with Python by Vipul Gupta

Vipul Gupta also proposed talk for PyCon India 2018 and was ready with his talk to share his experience with Dotfiles. He bagan by explaining what exactly Dotfiles are and why do a developer needs to be concerned about it especially in a *nix machine. Then came the part where he made everyone realised that there Dotfiles have been sitting in the machine all along and managed by the os but since they are human readable, becomes an advantage in development process. He explained symlinking the Dotfiles to a central directory which can be made a git repository for version control. This way even when the machine crashed or there's an os update, developer will never loose their favorite configuration. He then elaborated with how Python came in play in order to manage these Dotfiles with the help of Homely.

PyCon India 2018 Proposal - Keeping your Dotfiles in check with Python by Vipul Gupta

Lightning Talk and Hiring/Pitching Session

Manas Kashyap gave a lightning talk about 'Python Packaging- The messy wormhole'. He has been packaging node modules for Debian lately and explained the process Debian uses in a brief time.

Packaging Doc

Gaurav Sehrawat gave a talk explaining different DNS records a person can use while managing hosting account. He used his clean and self explanatory slides for the same.

Slides - DNS Records

Community Mixer

This is a part where we invite different open source communities around Delhi to pitch their work and invite volunteer and collaboraters. For this meetup we had LinuxChix India, PyLadies Delhi and Indian Linux User Groups Delhi 's volunteer who explained what they are working on and how to attend their next meetup.

Conclusion

By the end of the event it was time to pitch PyCon India 2018 which is scheduled for early October and invite folks who are willing to volunteer for the same. Also, PyDelhi which is responsible for the meetup in progress shared more about the community and how a person can volunteer to make these events happen.

Make sure you follow us on our social media accounts to get news about the next event. Checkout PyDelhi.org

How PyDelhi conducts Hiring and Pitching sessions

2018-05-02T00:00:00+05:30

Hiring and Pitching sessions have been a part of PyDelhi events since the beginning. The session is scheduled close to the end of every event just before the closing notes. This blog is to help out volunteers and participants by putting organized structure to the entire process. Points raised below are the work of volunteers, open to discussion and will be shaped better with time.

Step 1 - Broadcasting on social media

Before the event starts, volunteers should share a link on etherpad to note down the details of the speakers. This will help attendees to be prepared beforehand and can be called by the volunteers during the session. Also, this will be beneficial for the folks who are not able to attend the event. Official PyDelhi channels (Twitter/FB) should be preferred to broadcast the link. Etherpad link which can be used is https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/Oms9Iw8MK4

Step 2 - Conducting Session

Close to the end of the event or by the schedule for Hiring and Pitching session, volunteers should open the etherpad link, preferably with the projector connected and invite the attendees to make their pitch one by one. If the person is not present, their details should be called out by volunteer themselves. After when the pre-submitted details are over, one of the volunteers should call folks from the audience to see if some of them would want to make a pitch.

Step 3 - Posting on Mailing Lists

After the event is over, one of the volunteers should draft a mail with the details of Hiring and Pitching etherpad. Etherpad can also be used to draft the mail and can also be shared on PyDelhi Telegram group of Volunteers for one final review. After the review, mail should be posted on PyDelhi mailing list and other mailing lists of FOSS user groups in and around Delhi.

Hence, we conclude one of the important sessions of PyDelhi.

PyDelhi Devsprint at Knowlarity, Gurugram

2018-04-28T00:00:00+05:30

This time the meetup was at Knowlarity, Ambience Mall, Gurugram. It began with everybody giving a brief introduction about their selves. And Sanyam started the introductory session of what is a Dev sprint? During Dev sprint, Mentors/Contributors of Open source projects guides participants from generating development build to submit a patch for a bug. It is best opportunity to experience the culture of Open source contribution. People from newbie to experienced together contribute to project. During the session, if you are stuck you can solve your confusions instantly by discussing with mentors. Ambarish Gupta, CEO Knowlarity, also introduced himself and the company.

The organisations who participated in this dev sprints along with their mentors were : 1. Kivy - Akshay Arora 2. Coala - Hemang Kumar and Rahul Jha 3. Mozilla - Sanyam Khurana for AddOn Server, Remo and Mozilla Central and Shashank Kumar for AddOn Frontend 4. Python - Sanyam Khurana for CPython

After the introductory session, everyone chose their project in which they wanted to contribute and the dev sprint started. But there were a bunch of students who were unfamiliar with Git and Github, so Priyank took the initiative to teach git/github to those students. The environment was full of zeal. Half way through the devsprint it was lunch time and Knowlarity had very generously sponsored lunch for all of us.

Soon after lunch, everyone was back to their work. Before hiring and pitching session, there was an inspirational talk by Ajay Shrivastava, CTO Knowlarity, with a closing remark "Work smart AND work hard. There is never a choice between the two. After all, it took Messi 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success!". After his talk was hiring and pitching session. Anybody who’s looking for a job, want to hire someone, want a mentor, want to work on a project, etc. can just simply come on and let everybody know about it. If there’s somebody who’s interested in any participants pitch, can contact them directly. So that was all for the day. Devsprint concluded with 11 Issues, 5 Pull requests and lots of swag from Pydelhi and Github successfully. I hope you have enjoyed it and would join us at the next meetup.

PyDelhi Meetup at Connaught Place

2018-03-31T00:00:00+05:30

This time the meetup was at Srijan Technologies, Connaught Place, Delhi. And everybody was already half way through the introduction session when I reached (yeah, I was late). Everybody introduced themselves and we straight away jumped into the talks without any further ado.

Rajat introduced the first speaker and called her upon the stage to deliver her talk. Gurma Bhatia, a Journalist, was our first speaker, and the title of her talk made me think ‘how the hell can you do that’ but she wiped out my doubts as she started talking. Title of the talk was ‘How to tell stories with code.’

Although Gurman is a journalist but she knows quite a bit about telling stories through code. Basically the talk was about how to convert data, which is difficult to comprehend, into more understandable visuals. She showed that visuals can make it easy to understand data by giving examples like Dowry deaths in Delhi, Paid Twitter followers, Decline of female singers in Bollywood music, etc. etc.

According to Gurman, the process of telling stories through code can be broken down into three parts: 1. Collecting information; 2. Making sense of it (analyse); 3. Communicating the information. Here these steps are looking like cakewalk, but actually the story is different. However, if you want know more about it, I suggest you go ahead and check out her slides, and do make sure you click on the links. Otherwise you’ll miss interesting stuff.

Next talk was by Sidhant Agarwal on connecting IOT with AI. Exciting, isn’t it? Rajat introduced him and handed over the stage.

Sidhant started his talk with explaining what is data science and from there lead it towards Artificial Intelligence. With examples he explained how a software can learn to recognize patterns if we expose it to enough relevant data.

When he was through half of the talk, he turned the talk towards Internet of Things and explained what it is and what impact it can have. Once we collected all parts of the puzzle, it was time to put them together. Sidhant showed how one can connect them, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things, efficiently with Intel hardware - Intel NUC Gateway.

It really creates an impact on the audience when speaker gives a demonstration to support his/her point. And Sidhant did the same. He connected an Intel NUC Gateway to his PC and showed that how it can detect smiling human faces and send data back for further analysis. I’m not able to fathom how much impact this technology can have on the world.

Both the talks were not only enlightening, they were mentally taxing also. So everybody wanted a snack break in order to give their minds some rest. Srijan Technologies had us covered there as well. They arranged Dominoz Pizzas with a cold drink for everybody. And of course, networking was there. I was a bit more inclined towards my Pizza, rather than networking. But guess what, I wasn’t alone who had that inclination towards pizza:

After eating pizzas, one should have a nap session. But hey! it’s PyDelhi, so it was lightning sessions’ turn. We had some young boys in the lightning sessions this time. The talks were on packaging, on documentation and Cook (which is an automated bidding system that Kuntal made all by himself.)

At the end, as always, we had pitching and hiring session. In case you are looking for a job, internship or looking to hire someone for some job. So in case you are looking for a job or to hire someone, you might want to come and check this next time at the next meetup, may be you'll find what you are looking for.

So that was all for the day. I hope you enjoyed it and we will see you in the next meetup. Until then, PyDelhi signing off. Good bye.

International Women's Day Mega Meetup

2018-03-11T12:00:00+05:30

When I did a Google search for ‘international women’s day,’ these lines were amongst the top results of that search:

“About International Women's Day (8 March) International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.”

While I was reading this, I was trying to find the word ‘technology,’ or something of that sort. I couldn’t find anything, maybe they didn’t think about it. I don’t know. But I know people who did think about it. PyDelhi, with other tech enthusiast communities, came together and organized a mega-meetup on 11th March, 2018, the theme of which was International Women’s Day.

The place for the meetup was the hall at Adobe’s Noida Building. A giant structure decorated with bold colors all around it with the dominance of dark grey in the middle. It looked like a great place for a mega-meetup like this one. Not only venue, Adobe also provided us with great food. Not once, thrice. And Guarav, the guy from Adobe, was really helpful and supportive. Thank Adobe!

In this meetup, there were three major talks. Curious case of JAVASCRIPT BY Neha Sharma was the first in line. The talk was about Javascript, as you must have guessed. She explained some nice points related to Javascript. In order to have a taste of the talk, check this out:

1<2<3 is true,

3>2>1 is not true.

Don’t think that there’s something wrong with your math, it’s the Javascript.

Second in line was Tannu Bansal on Amazon DynamoDB. She made a pressing point of why DynamoDB is a better choice over other options and explained ways of keeping the cost down. This session was not all theoretical, Tannu logged into her AWS account and gave some practical demonstration to the audience.

Although it was a quite informative session, yet I think the best part was when she offered that if any women who have left the industry for some reason and wants to join it again, she can contact Tannu for that.

The third talk was ‘Infusing AI into your apps’ by Ruhani Arora from Microsoft. We all know how popular and powerful this topic is. From explaining the concepts to discussing the wide range of uses of AI, all was covered in the talk. Along with that, she covered that how Azure can play a vital role in achieving the desired results.

As you must have noticed that all the speakers above were women. Even in the audience men were outnumbered by women with a big margin. Not only that, somewhat same was the case with lightning talks also.

Lightning talks was the next session. The chance for everyone to let others know what he/she have got. As you all know, in lightening session, people from the audience are given five minutes to talk and present whatever idea they have. Wearable electronics, an app to pass on academic resources, natural language processing, android development for small businesses, amongst others were some topics presented by people from the audience.

The purpose of this meetup was to encourage women in the tech world. So is the purpose of this blog post. But when I completed the draft of this post and sent it over to a friend for proofreading, he pointed out a flaw in the post which I didn’t know how to correct.

He pointed out that the content of the post is well on its purpose, yet it might work the other way than expected. If women got encouraged and increased their participation, this will, in turn, encourage even more men and disbalance the sex ratio again.

Although he has a point, but we can’t correct it. Nobody can.

Jokes apart, we sincerely want and hope for more and more women participation in our meetups and the whole tech world. With that, we have come to the end of another meetup. But before we sign off, let me tell you which were those communities, other than PyDelhi, because of whom this all could become possible:

Women Who Code, Women Techmakers, LinuxChix India, Women Who Go, PyLadies Delhi, Mozilla Delhi Open Community, Women in machine learning and data science

It was nice working in collaboration with all these groups. PyDelhi wants to thank them for coming together for this meetup and look forward to working with them again in future.

Ok then. See you at the next meetup. Till next time. Happy International Women’s Day.

PyDelhi Meetup – 17th March, 2018

2017-03-17T12:00:00+05:30

Saturday, 17/03/2018, was the day for another PyDelhi meetup. A day for tech lovers to come together and learn from each other.

The venue of the meetup was again Fueled, Noida. Rajat and Gourav came to the stage and started the meetup with the introductions. Since in every meetup there are people who are coming for the first time, it’s good to start with introductions. One by one, everybody, including the hosts and the audience, gave a brief introduction about themselves.

In the introduction session, Rajat and Gourav also shared some useful information about the PyDelhi. Like about the PyDelhi Volunteer Group on Telegram (which you can join here) and the fact that PyDelhi is one of the organizers of PyCon India 2018.

After introductions, it was time for the Talk Session and the first talk was given by TK Saurabh on logging in python. The talk highlighted the basic features of Logging and why we should consider it over print statement debugging.

He discussed various techniques and methods that are available in the python logging module in the std lib. Including implementation/demo of the sample application with logging.

TK talked about the different logging levels, Loggers and LogRecords, Handlers and Formatters. He also talked about the ways to configure logging manually or by using File Config or DictConfig. The code for the above talk is pushed.

It was snack break after the first talk, and when everybody was done with their Samosas, we started with the second talk – Github for Noobs by Aniket. It was a very basic tutorial on how to use version control management service through Git and Github to maintain your code. The talk explained basic features of Git. Note:Git and Github are two different things not to be confused with each other.

In order to explain the whole thing, Aniket demonstrated how to push a simple commit into an empty repository with a few commands:

git init
git remote add origin "link to repo url...."
git add .
git commit -m "init"
git push -u origin master

Here’s what each line of code is doing: - The first line creates an empty repository into your project directory. - The second line acts as a pointer for your Git directory to your repository on Github/GitLab/whatever the link to which is defined by the origin. - The third line stages all your changes for the commit. - The fourth line commits your changes into the Git file with a description "init" for initialize. - The last line pushes your commits or changes into your repository.

Then Gourav announced the lightning Talk Session. Amongst others, there was a lightening talk which was not related to python or anything technical for that matter. The talk was given by Anuvrat on touch typing, i.e. typing with all your fingers without looking at the keyboard.

The talk started with two-sided verbal communication between the speaker and the audience. But gradually speaker started to type, which was being projected on the screen, and stopped talking entirely. As you can see in the picture above. Speaker was communicating with the audience through typed text and showing what is it like to do touch typing. Do you think we can even call it a ‘talk’ anymore? Never mind!

Before the end of the talk, the speaker invited everybody for a race on typeracer.com. Anuvrat and some people in the audience joined the race. Results of the race showed that there were more people in the audience who know touch typing.

As always, it was pitching session at the end. Where people can let everyone know about the thing that they are looking for. You can subscribe to the mailing list in case you want to check out all the pitches.

That was all for the day. Another PyDelhi meetup got concluded successfully. I hope you have enjoyed it and would join us at the next meetup.

PyDelhi Meetup – 17th February, 2018

2017-02-17T12:00:00+05:30

Okay! So, let me start with a question to you all. Do you think that you know python?

If you have been working with python for some time, then your answer to the question would probably be yes. Just like many of those who were asked “what would be the output of this:”

  def append_to(element, to=[]):
       to.append(element)
       return to

  my_list = append_to(12)
  print my_list
  my_other_list = append_to(42)
  print my_other_list

Gaurav gave a talk at the PyDelhi meetup on 17th of February, 2018. The above question is from one of the slides that he showed to everybody at the meetup. He also revealed the right answer, of course. But before I tell you what it is, let me tell you how it all started.

The PyDelhi meetup was held at Fueled and it started at 12 in the noon. It began with everybody giving a brief introduction about their selves. And the introduction session made it clear that people there, were from very diverse backgrounds. Yet they all had one common reason to come together – python.

After introduction session completed, the talk by Gaurav on “Gotchas in python” was next. As you must have guessed, the talk was about sharing some insights of python language. But instead of simply sharing them with everyone, the speaker decided to do it the hard way (hard for us, not him). Everybody was shown some code in python and asked this question “what would be the output of this,” the same way you’ve been asked. So that everybody can test their python skills before speaker reveals the right answer.

If you have tested your python skills with the above question sincerely, then you must be thinking – ‘did the speaker at the meetup also made you wait so long for the right answer.’ So, before you start thinking that loudly, I should share the right answer with you:

 [12]
 [12, 42]

A new list gets created once when the function is defined, and the same list is used in each successive call. But here’s what you might have expected to be the output:

 [12]
 [42]

If you got the answer right on your own, that’s great. If not, that’s even better, because it means that I’m not alone here. However, if you are thinking how this can be the output, let’s make it clear for you:

Python’s default arguments are evaluated once when the function is defined, not each time the function is called (like it is in say, Ruby). This means that if you use a mutable default argument and mutate it, you have mutated that object for all future calls to the function as well.

The next session lined up after Gotchas was “Lightening Session.” In lightening session, anybody from the audience can come on the stage and give a talk in a bolt of five minutes about any topic he or she likes. If five minutes seems too short to you, I tell you what, it’s not. At PyDelhi, a lot can happen over a bolt of five minutes.

Downloading language specific software packages, machine learning, contributing to open source projects were some of the topics that people talked about in this meetup. All these talks were short, precise and to the point. PyDelhi appreciates the willingness of all these participants.

Near the end was pitching session. Anybody who’s looking for a job, want to hire someone, want a mentor, want to work on a project, etc. etc. can just simply come on the stage and let everybody know about it. If there’s somebody who’s interested in any participants pitch, can contact him or her directly.

Pitching was the last session of the meetup. Thus, after the pitching session and with some positive feedback from the participants, one more PyDelhi meetup got concluded successfully. With the conclusion of one, a preparation for the next meetup has already started, and I hope to see you all there. Till then!.....hey! wait wait wait!!! Let me end it where we just started – do you think you know python? Let’s find out:

 def create_multipliers():
     return [lambda x : i * x for i in range(5)]

 for multiplier in create_multipliers():
     print multiplier(2)

PyDelhi MayPy

2016-05-14T12:00:00+05:30

May 14th marked by scorching heat and to tackle it we had some cool Python libraries and Framework to learn, share and interact at the PyDelhi Meetup at Fueled Noida Office. Attended by 40 python enthusiasts.

Hackathon Listing Platform using Django Framework

First we had Pulkit Pahwa, taking up a knowledge enriching session on Django Web Framework. The agenda was to build a Hackathon listing platform sort of a mini-hackerearth which required basic knowledge of Python. Started with the creation of the Django project,and then an app for Hackathon related information with the models.py dealing with the data and model fields, urls.py for url configurations and mapping the urls to the handlers lodged in the views.py of our app using the Django ORM.

Following explains the entire flow of the web application built on Django.

The interaction led process of request response cycle and how Django handles the requests and rendering the data onto the templates. A nicely pulled up session came to an end with our dummy Hackathon lists brightening up our pages running on our very own Django development server with developers getting in touch with the awesomeness(speed and ease) of the Django Framework.

Refreshments are just a way to get to interact with people about their work experience, their findings, and best practices of problem solving. You never know which statement might prove helpful to you at what point in your project.

Getting Python to interact with Java and objc using PyJnius and PyObjus

Next we had a talk on "Getting python to interact with Java, Obj-C using PyJnius and PyObjus." by Akkshay Arora, - Python, Linux lover, core-dev of kivy. The discussion involved a few python libraries which provide modules and methods to interact with other languages without diving much into it. The usage of this can simply be explained by thinking of a situation where you can have the best of two languages with the knowledge of one - feels weird right? But this is actually possible.

PyJNIus - A Python module to access Java classes as Python classes using JNI.

With a quick overview :

from jnius import autoclass
autoclass('java.lang.System').out.println('Hello world')
Hello world
Stack = autoclass('java.util.Stack')
stack = Stack()
stack.push('hello')
stack.push('world')
print stack.pop()
world
print stack.pop()
hello

Now with this great library the difference to other projects is that apps can take advantage of python-for-android’s relatively extensive toolchain including python3.5 support, the ability to build popular libraries like numpy, support for multiple architectures, and access to the Android API via PyJNIus or Plyer rather than SL4A.

PyObjus - Python module for accessing Objective-C classes as Python classes using Objective-C runtime reflection.

from pyobjus import autoclass, objc_str
from pyobjus.dylib_manager import load_framework, INCLUDE
load_framework(INCLUDE.AppKit)
# get nsalert class
NSAlert = autoclass('NSAlert')
# create an NSAlert object, and show it.
alert = NSAlert.alloc().init()
alert.setMessageText_(objc_str('Hello world!'))
alert.runModal()

So, autoclass is the heart of pyobjus. With this function, you load Objective C classes into pyobjus which then constructs a Python wrapper around these objects. You can load external code into pyobjus using the load_framework function, or by using load_dylib. The load_framework function uses NSBundle for loading the framework into pyobjus, and the load_dylib function uses ctypes for loading external .dylib objects into pyobjus.

Well this is just a trailer and here we believe the script of the movie should be written by you. Keep exploring and explain yourself the reason why these excellent libraries and frameworks have been built with a Project or application. Because Necessity is long gone. Now innovation mothers Invention.

Subscribe to our blog and follow us on social media and keep coming to the meetups on alternate Saturdays.

Looking forward to meet you!! Till then this is PyDelhi signing off.

Hello PyDelhi

2016-01-17T12:00:00+05:30

This is an example blog post. Not much here but that's not the point :)