PyData London - 78th meetup

Venue: 1 Angel Lane, EC4R 3AB

Please note:

1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. You MUST use your full real names on your meetup profile, otherwise, you will NOT make it on the guest list! 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.

Tickets are assigned through a lottery draw about 1 week before the event.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No further confirmation required. You will NOT need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.

If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know so we can assign your place to someone on the waiting list.

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Code of Conduct:
This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct.

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As always, there'll be free food & drinks, generously provided by our host, Man Group.

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Main Talks
1️⃣ Create Self-Serve Data Using This One Weird Trick - Oliver Laslett (Co-Founder & CTO, LightDash)

Are you ready to transform how your business interacts with data? This talk will decode the magic of the Semantic Layer within the "modern data stack." This business-friendly veil over your data empowers effortless discovery and access, using everyday language to breach the wall between data sources and business users. The Semantic Layer can fire up your team collaboration, mining insights from data effortlessly, whilst fortifying data security and governance. Learn to unlock the thrill of self-service reporting, boost productivity, and create a climate of data-informed decisions.

2️⃣ Adventures in Unicode: the `str` less travelled - Alistair Lynn (Software Engineer, Tiqets)

Python 3's `str` was a leap forward but not a panacea. Join me to dive into the strange world of unicode, how it can bite you, and what to do about it.

In Python 3 we finally got a Unicode-native `str` type throughout, and there was much rejoicing. But Unicode is a tricky beast, difficult to tame, and there are still plenty of ways it can bite you if you are not careful.
We will look at some of these ways, the eldritch abominations looming in shadowy corners of Python's text; we will discover how the siren-song of seemingly innocuous strings can dash you upon the rocks, the deep peculiarity of the humble flag, and finally come to inner peace and harmony as we understand true grapheme-nature. We will then touch on the deeper mysteries of bidirectional text, and our hearts will turn to despair. It will be a fun time.

Lightning Talks ⚡
⚡1️⃣ Polars' Craziest Feature: bytecode parsing - Marco Gorelli

There's a lot of buzz around Polars, and people usually talk about lazy execution, Rust, or fast-track algorithms.

But there's one newish feature which hasn't yet been talked about much: bytecode parsing.

When you use apply inefficiently, polars will not only tell you, it'll also advise you on how you could have written your code in a better way.
Marco is a volunteer maintainer of polars, and Senior Software Engineer at Quansight Labs. He will give a demo of the feature, and briefly explain how it works.

⚡2️⃣ Set Up Your Own ML Cluster - Marco Ghilardi

Cloud computing is great but it also has its downsides such as high costs and vendor lock-in. Why not setting up a "private cloud" at home with an old PC? We could then perform ML experiments, have our data always available, and much more.

Logistics
Doors open at 6.30 pm (get there early as you have to sign-in via building security), talks start at 7 pm, drinks from 9 pm in the bar. We will have reduced capacity for this event but there will be plenty of people to discuss data science questions with!

Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!

Follow @pydatalondon (https://twitter.com/pydatalondon) for updates and early announcements.