ChiPy __main__ Meeting presents Self-Driving Cars and Python Tools

Chicago Python will be live streaming our September main Meeting to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBGUlbcHi2k

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AGENDA
6:00 - Broadcast starts on YouTube
8:30 - Estimated end time

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TALKS

Snakes on a Car: Or, Over-engineering a Toy
by Kat Cosgrove

Like a lot of engineers, I like to tinker. I also like hardware hacking, video games, and over-engineering the hell out of something. When my team at work decided to build a proof of concept demonstrating the possibility of fast over-the-air updates for edge devices, we settled on using a car as the example of an edge device. It’s flashy, you know? This also presented me with an opportunity to do all of the things I love, and call it work: build a self-driving RC car, and then let people race it around a track using a repurposed USB racewheel, a handful of open-source tools, and whole lotta Python. DevOps, but make it fun.

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Don’t be beholden to your tools
by Dave Trollope

How KnowledgeHound innovated by breaking usage of existing tools to solve two immediate problems. A discussion of Django, SQLAlchemy, Pure Python, and Pandas.

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Fun with Finite State Machines
by Aly Sivji

Finite State Machines (FSM) are tools we can use to model simple and complex workflows. In this (non-mathematical) talk, we will learn about FSMs and examine how they can be used to improve software design. We’ll finish by diving deep into a couple of Python implementations of FSMs.

Full disclosure: one of the implementations is a library I created.