Introductions, Science, and Python 3.6

For our first meeting we will make some introductions, talk about the results of the MadPy survey and the goals of the group, and sprinkle in some lightning talks about some Python topics near and dear to our hearts.

We sent out a survey to a bunch of people and found that most are interested in using Python for scientific computing, software engineering, and web development. There is definitely interest in having meetings that are primarily educational. The top three types of events desired are presentations, Python schooling, and hack nights. Most survey takers described themselves as Intermediate pythonistas, but there is interest in content across a spectrum of skill levels. We found that many survey takers were also members of Big Data Madison, Data Science Madison, and the Madison R User Group. In our first meeting, we'll talk about these survey results in more detail, and also have an open discussion about what people want to get out of the group.

After the organizational stuff is out of the way, Pierce and Dan will give short talks showing off some things we love about python. Pierce will talk about analyzing survey data in Python. He’ll show how to download Google survey responses with gspread, tidy the data with pandas, and plot the results with matplotlib. Dan will talk about the latest and greatest in Python by showing off some of the new features in Python 3.6 such as the now stable asyncio module, asynchronous generators and comprehensions, and the new way to format strings.

Hope to see you there!

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