PhillyPUG September 2011 Meetup - Rolling Thunder Talks

Hi All,

Our September meeting will consist of six (6) Rolling Thunder Talks (15 - 20 mins each). Our food and location sponsor is Monetate. Many thanks to Monetate for their support.

NOTE: This meeting will take place at Monetate's new office (not the same place as last time we met at Monetate). The office is walking distance from the Spring Mill SEPTA Regional Rail station on the Norristown Line.

The agenda is as follows:

6:30 PM - 7:00 PM - Food, networking, and a word from our sponsor, Monetate

7:00 PM - 8:30 PM - Rolling Thunder Talks (details below)

8:30 PM - Open social/networking[1]

Rolling Thunder Talks:

1. Patrick O'Brien will be talking about web crawling / screen scraping using the Python library Scrapy. Scrapy is a pure Python implementation that offers fast and simple extraction of data from the internet. The goal will be to give a brief overview of Scrapy's features and to create our own fully functional spider. Patrick started at Monetate in August of 2010 and in his previous life was a mechanical engineer. He is originally from the Philadelphia area.

2. From CGI to libevent: a brief demonstration of (nearly) all deployment options for Python web applications. As an engineer at Monetate, Hunter Blanks divides his time between user interface, architecture, backend services, and data processing. His favorite tools to work with are Python, Google Closure, and anything written by Ian Bicking.

3. Generating Canvas Art with pyffmpeg. Karl is an Engineer at Monetate where he splits his time with Javascript and Python. Hailing from Long Island, he currently lives in Center City, and enjoys writing music and drinking caramel cappuccinos.

4. TBD, Monetate

5. Make maps the FLOSS way, with Mapnik! An overview on how to turn geographic information into a map, using open data and open source. Mapnik (http://mapnik.org) is an open source GIS toolkit in C++ and Python that, among other things, powers all the map tiles on Open Street Map (http://www.openstreetmap.org). Nick Canzoneri is a Drexel grad and software engineer at Algorithmics, a financial risk management company. Nick is passionate about web development, GIS, and a bunch of other topics. You can contact Nick or look at some of his projects at Github (https://github.com/ac3522).

6. TBD (open slot)

As you can see, we have one more opening for a talk. If you would like to give that talk, please contact me with a proposed topic and we can get you on the agenda. Just a little nudge here... Monetate, one of the fastest growing startups in Philly, is hiring Python-people. You will be in their building for our meeting. If you give a (good) talk on something really cool you may entice Tom, Hunter, or one of the other Monetate guys to get you in for an interview. Just sayin....

See you in September,

Tom.

[1] As always, line up your babysitters now. We will be hanging out for a while after the meeting. We will start at Monetate and (if necessary) migrate over to Coyote Crossing (http://www.coyotecrossing.com/), a short walk from Monetate.