How I use Python and Jupyter Notebook to make the Tampa Bay Tech Events List

In the last “Think Like a Coder!” meetup, we did some basic web scraping in order to build a simple application that let us know if Publix Chicken Nugget Subs were on sale. In this meetup, I’ll take it to the next level by showing you how I use Python scripts embedded inside a Jupyter Notebook to automate a lot of the work that goes into building the weekly list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay.

Along the way, I’ll cover topics such as:

• The REAL reason started posting the list in the first place, which was back in April 2017, and how it’s paid off
• The original, painful way the list was built
• The power of enlightened laziness
• Using Python to automate opening browser windows
• Using Beautiful Soup — a great web scraping library with a silly name — to pluck specific information from web pages
• Fear, loathing, and regular expressions
• Using Jupyter Widgets as a quick and dirty way to create GUI web applications
• Automating the tedious, repetitive, mechanical part of the job, while leaving the “thinky”, make-a-judgement-call part of the job to the human
• Building tech communities

Join me, as I demonstrate and walk you through my code, and what I was thinking when I put it together!

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The “Think Like a Coder!” meetup’s mission is to help you make the leap from knowing how to program to knowing how to WRITE programs. This is a skill you can master, and you do so by learning to think like a coder! In this meetup, we’ll work together toward that goal, and sharpen our collective skills along the way.

We’ll start with online meetups until the COVID-19 numbers drop further, and then we’ll see about going in-person.