Come join us at the Champaign Public Library, in our regular room this time (Robeson Pavilion Room C, first floor lobby area, right across from the coffeeshop stand), 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM.
The agenda includes:
Main presentation
Austin Rochford will talk about probabilistic programming with PyMC.
Choosing a new meeting time/day
Since we started Py-CU last February, our General Meetings have been every other Friday. Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone so we put up a Doodle poll and the majority of the votes given went to Monday nights. However, Nadia and Liz will be busy with the Python Beginner Tutorial series until the end of October. We need to figure out whether we will keep our General Meetings on Fridays until the series is over or if there are people who can fill in and lead meetings temporarily, through the end of October. So if there is anyone who is willing to lead meetings on Mondays after our September 27 meeting, please email us info@py-cu.org!
Birds of a Feather sessions
Lightning talks
We don’t have a lightning talk this week, but we’re up for anything, if you’ve got an idea for one.
Python coding challenges
We’re exploring the idea of doing something like a Coding Dojo, which is “a meeting where a bunch of coders get together to work on a programming challenge. They are there have fun and to engage in Deliberate Practice [the idea that in order to get better at something, you need to practice] . . . focussing on coding in front of others, most often something from scratch, in a very short amount of time . . .” (http://codingdojo.org)
These are regular Python challenges during our meetings that are meant to help us all sharpen our Python skills. Here’s our GitHub repository with a couple easy example challenges and some ideas for more involved challenges. If you’d like to contribute, email us at info@py-cu.org and let us know.
Py-CU Camp Beginner Tutorials update
So far we’ve had two of our (in total six) weekly tutorials, and they’re going well. They’re even “fun,” according to some participants. Check out our new Tumblr, where we’re posting our lesson content as well as other relevant stuff. One of the best things about these is our high instructor/helper to student ratio, so if anyone with some experience in Python would like to come to these to help out on the ground, that would be awesome. The next tutorial is taking place this coming Monday, September 30th, 6:30 - 8:30 PM at the Fab Lab, located at 1301 S. Goodwin Ave. in Urbana.