London Python Winter 2024 Event

Join us this Tuesday, November 19th, in London, for talks and a winter networking event! If you are in the tech industry, or wanting to get into the tech industry, come and mingle over drinks and nibbles, and chat about workshops, jobs, the weather, and of course - Python!

We will be hosted by Microsoft at their Microsoft Reactor space in Paddington, London. You will be issued an electonic pass by building management, so please provide your email address when you RSVP.

SCHEDULE
Here's the updated event schedule for Tuesday -
6:00 - 6:30pm Check in / Networking over Drinks & Nibbles
6:30 - 6:40pm Intro/Welcome
6:40 - 7:10pm Talk 1 (Neil Gibbons)
7:10 - 7:55pm Talk 2 (Tom Forbes)
7:55 - 8:30pm More Networking over Drinks / Nibbles

TALK 01 - An Introduction to Spark's Internals, by Neil Gibbons

Synopsis
Spark is a tool for processing large volumes of data, made popular in the python community through PySpark. Spark is powerful because it hides a lot of complexity behind simple interfaces.

However, hiding this complexity so well makes it difficult to get a feeling for how the framework operates behind the scenes. In this talk, I will introduce key aspects of Spark's internal workings, covering topics such as Spark's implementation of the Map/Reduce paradigm, the core abstraction Spark is built on (Resilient Distributed Datasets), and walking through the way Spark's Scheduler transforms code into computation and results.

Whether you are new to Spark or are looking to build your confidence and begin to use more advanced features, there is something in this talk for all!

Speaker Bio
Neil is an MSc Computer Science student at the University of St Andrews, with a particular interest in Distributed Systems. He has worked extensively with data processing tools, including Spark, through his previous role as a Backend Engineer. In his spare time, Neil enjoys singing in choirs and sea swimming.

TALK 02
Committing 1 Bajillion lines of code to GitHub, and other fun things to do at the weekend, by Tom Forbes

Synopsis
This talk details the how and why of a project that continuously uploads all the code from the Python package registry into GitHub, what kinds of things the creator found lurking in the depths of PyPI and what happened after he released it.

Speaker Bio
Tom Forbes is a staff engineer at GitGuardian. He loves Python, Rust and security.