BayPiggies August 2026: AI Harnesses, Saloons, Marimo, PyBay!

BayPIGgies... in-person this month at the San Jose Library, West Valley Branch
1243 San Tomas Aquino Rd San Jose, CA 95117

**RSVP here on Meetup by the night before - Wednesday August 26**

Announcements:

• PyBay 2026 Updates - Oct 3, 2026
• Hiring & Looking for Work

Schedule:
6:30 Network and Refreshments
7:00 Welcome + Announcements
7:05 PyBay 2026 Updates
7:15 Talks:

• Michael Galarnyk - "Building Presentation Slides and Videos with a Python AI Harness"
• Mike Purtell - "Marimo - the Next Generation of Python notebooks"
• James Abel - "How Python and AI helped keep me from getting thrown out of a saloon"

8:30 Networking
9:00 Wrap-up

**** Talks *****
"PyBay 2026 Update" presented by Chris Brousseau
Are you attending PyBay 2026? It's on 3 October in San Francisco - get your tickets now! https://pybay.org/

"Marimo - the Next Generation of Python notebooks" presented by Mike Purtell
A Jupyter notebook will be shown to demonstrate linear execution, hidden state, and drifting outputs. From there will move through five Marimo notebooks that progressively demonstrate how reactive execution creates a cleaner, more reliable, and more interactive workflow.

Mike Purtell is a Semiconductor Test Engineer who relies on Python for data analysis, instrument control, and everyday automation. He’s an active volunteer in the Bay Area Python community and is a member of the Python Software Foundation.

"Building Presentation Slides and Videos with a Python AI Harness" presented by Michael Galarnyk
Generating a few slides with a chatbot is easy. Building presentation slides and videos with a Python AI harness is not. This talk covers structuring content, generating narration, catching silent failures, and designing retry loops instead of hoping the next prompt works. Attendees will leave with a practical Python pattern for AI presentation pipelines, plus a clear sense of where the harness helps and where a careful presenter still has to step in.

Michael Galarnyk is currently a PhD Student at Georgia Institute of Technology researching machine learning for financial markets with an emphasis on how social media impacts financial markets. He has been teaching python and machine learning since 2015 at places like UCSD Extension, Stanford Continuing Studies, and LinkedIn Learning. He previously worked at Scripps Research Translational Institute working on the interpretation of wearable data for human health, with the goal of building models to improve patient outcomes.

"How Python and AI helped keep me from getting thrown out of a saloon" presented by James Abel
I got a new bar gig. I had to learn 30 new songs on bass in a week. I didn't want to get thrown out of the saloon for not knowing my parts. I needed to do various audio manipulations such as extract instrument parts and transpose. There are some products on the market that do this, but they didn't fit my situation. What could I do? Turn to Python and AI of course. Within a day I (we?) created a Python app that does everything I need. In the Old Days (a couple years ago), this would not have been feasible, as it would have taken weeks. In this talk I'll describe how I worked with Python and Claude Code to create this app, what worked, what didn't, and what I learned along the way.

James Abel is a hardware and software engineer in the Bay Area. Interests include cloud architectures, computer architectures, digital signal processing, machine learning, application analysis, performance analysis and optimization, design automation, and simulation. James mainly programs in Python these days and is a PSF Fellow. He also plays bass whenever possible.
Register by Wednesday August 26!

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Personal Donations: Please consider supporting future BayPiggies events and Python in the Bay Area at the link below via the Bay Area Python Association and the Python Software Foundation:
https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&id=43