Why should I be interested in Python? + Meet other Pythonistas

The first meeting of the Leicester Python User Group.
Primarily to meet up with established and prospective Pythonistas (the name given to people who use Python).

If you don't know anyone yet, don't worry, we will run a short, painless icebreaker exercise so you can find someone you'd might like to talk to, and have something you can reference as an introduction.

Paul Muston from Musoft will give a talk on how useful Python is for getting stuff done and in production. For anything from a quick script, through to production automation, including big data analytics, to production websites include SaaS. It is also great for learning aspects of computing, either imperative or declarative, object oriented or functional programming.
The Python language has just 33 keywords, but is extremely expressive. There are currently 68480 packages available on PyPI, which are just a “pip install” aware. Packages range from fuzzy date parsing utilities to web frameworks used by the likes of Pinterest and Instagram. It also has package that excel in the fields of data processing and machine learning.

Paul will give 4 concrete examples to show how by using Python’s extensive library of modules you can do really useful things in 20ish lines of code or less, thus making Python an excellent choice for rapidly and easily bending the will of the computer to do your bidding, rather than the other way around!

A lightning talk by Maximilian Friedersdorff, a CompSci MSc student at UoL, will give another concrete example of the Python script he wrote to convert and import into Google calendar, a confusing time table format issued by the University. The outcome is that his lecture times are now readily at hand on his mobile phone.