PhillyPUG January 2012 Meetup - Spyder

Hi All,

As most of you know, PhillyPUG and PyStar (http://pystar.org/) Philly are officially one group. Our January 2012 meeting will be our first meeting using our new format. The current plan, with the exception of special events (e.g., Redsnake), will follow this general format.

Our January meeting will be held at Azavea (http://www.azavea.com/) (not too far from Sungard, directions are here: http://www.azavea.com/info/directions/philadelphia (http://www.azavea.com/info/directions/philadelphia/)). We are excited to have Azavea on board as a new PhillyPUG sponsor. Thanks Team Azavea! Here is the agenda for the meeting:

6:30 PM - 7:00 PM - Food, networking, and a word from our sponsor (Azavea)

7:00 PM - 7:20 PM - Frustration-free Python by Andrew Jennings

7:20 PM - 8:00 PM - Spyder by John Granieri

8:00 PM - 8:30 PM - Lightning Talks

8:30 PM - Leave for Prohibition Taproom

January's PyStar talk is called "Frustration-free Python." In this talk, Andrew Jennings will go over best practices for setting up a robust Python development environment. This is a beginner-friendly talk, with plenty of good tips for more experienced developers.

In January's featured talk, John Granieri will cover Spyder. Spyder ( http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/ ) is an interactive environment for Python development (an IDE), with a particular focus for people who are using the Python scientific stack (Numpy/Scipy). It can be used as a MATLAB-like environment, and helps support the interactive and incremental style for Python programming common in functional, array-oriented, data-intensive transformation and analysis programs.

About our speakers:

Andrew Jennings is a software developer at Azavea and a volunteer instructor with PyStar Philly. He contributes to District Builder, an open source redistricting platform. Andrew admits that he wasn't using python before it was cool but he's a big fan now.

John Granieri works at SIG, a global financial trading firm headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, on systems for trading strategy research, development, and optimization. He did graduate work on real-time 3D animation systems. He has used and been a proponent of Python for over 15 years.

This meeting will be a great kick-off to our new year. The weather will be cold, but, the beer at Prohibition will be too. Line up your babysitters now! -Tom.