Curious Venn

It may have been the first day of spring but it was a cold, wet night for the September Melbourne Python Users Group meeting. We had at least twenty five people attend for three talks.
Thanks to Inspire 9 for hosting and Planet Innovation for sponsoring the meeting.

1. Javier Candeira – What’s new in Python

Javier updated us on what’s new and interesting in Python over the last month. His slides are online.

2. Andy Kitchen – Pattern Recognition: machine learning on GPUs in the cloud

Andy is a developer at Silverpond and walked us through using Theano for deep learning applications.

• Deep learning is (very) computationally intensive
• Hyperdimensional optimisation, mostly dense-matrix multiplication – use GPUs because they are often 40x faster than CPU
• GPU programming tricky but getting easier (eg. CUDA and Theano)
• Amazon EC2 for about $5/hr: NVIDIA AMI with CUDA, surprisingly smooth!
• Theano: write once for CPU or GPU (via CUDA backend) by building expression trees
• Demo: 14.23 secs with CPU, 1.14 secs with GPU
• (Sidenote: it is also worth looking at NumbaPro from Continuum)

3. Jason King – BDD using Behave with Selenium

Jason took us through some recent work he has been doing at Common Code for testing an online medical appointment booking system. He has been using Selenium and Behave, a BDD framework that uses decorators to determine what test to execute.

A strong line-up of speakers and the post-PyCon AU buzz meant that we had about 35 people at the August Melbourne Python Users Group meeting. There were five presentations for the night and here are my random notes.

1. Highlights from PyCon AU 2014

Various people contributed their highlights of PyCon AU 2014, which was in Brisbane in early August (and the reason why the MPUG meeting was moved back a week). The conference videos are now up on the Youtube channel.

2. Javier Candeira: “Don’t monkeypatch None!”

Javier was inspired by discussion at PyCon AU about PEP 336 (Make None Callable) and decided to implement it, with some inspiration from previous PyCon AU talks by Ryan Kelly, Richard Jones (“Don’t do this!”), Nick Coghlan (“Elegant and ugly hacks in CPython”) and Larry Hastings.

He has implemented quiet_None, an analog to quiet_NaN. He walked us through the prototype code, with a deviation into Haskell’s Maybe monad along the way.

A few random notes:

• Uses the ContextDecorator class
• Module: “forbiddenfruit” and “curse” function
• Won’t work on stackless or IronPython (as they have no working implementation of sys._getframe()
• Problems with exceptions, so the code needs to monkeypatch Exception!

3. Juan Nunez-Iglesias: SciPy 2014, a summary

Juan works at VLSCI and is a scikit-image contributor

• Great quote: Greg Wilson (keynote) on Software Carpentry: “we save researchers a day a week for the rest of their careers”
• Lots of core devs from biggest names in Python scientific stack
• Excellent tutorials; massive geoscience track, massive education track
• EuroSciPy seems to be more academic
• PyCon AU – very web development focus

SciPy 2014 highlights:

• Michael Droettboom – Airspeed Velocity: code benchmarking tool with web interface and plots
• Paul Ivanov – IPython vimception: vim bindings for IPython notebook
• Damian Avila – RISE: live presentations from IPython notebooks
• MinRK (from core IPython team) – IPython Parallel tutorial
• Brian Granger & ????
• Aaron Meurer: Conda – good package manager for C extensions as well as Python packages
• Matt Rocklin, Mark Wiebe: Blaze – abstracting away tabular data

Recommended lightning talks:

• Project Jupyter
• Waffles

On Juan’s “to watch” list:

• Chris Fonnesbeck PyMC tutorial (see Jake Vanderplas’s Bayesian vs frequentist posts)
• David Sanders: Julia tutorial
• Reproducible science tutorial (lots of buzz on this tutorial)
• Geoscience and education tracks
• Diversity: 1.5% women in 2013, 15% in 2014 – indicative of a big problem in the industry

4. Rory Hart: Microservices in Python

This was a repeat of Rory’s PyCon AU 2014 talk (here’s the video).

5. Nick Farrell: sux

Nick gave a repeat of his PyCon AU 2014 lightning talk on the sux library, which allows you to transparently use Python 2 packages in Python 3.

We had over forty people brave the Melbourne winter to come to the July meeting, to hear Bernie Pope‘s brilliant talk on “Implementing Python in Haskell, twice!”. Most people sleep on trans-Pacific flights; Bernie is not one of those people: “By the end of the trip I had a workable Python-to-Haskell translator”.

This talk was an adapted version of an earlier talk that Bernie had given to the Melbourne Haskell Users Group earlier this year.

The slides (PDF) are online, and the different projects are available on GitHub.

And finally a reminder that MPUG is not on tonight: to avoid a clash with PyCon AU, this month’s meeting has been moved to August 11. See you there!

We had over 30 people at the June MPUG meeting. Here (finally) are my notes…

1. “What’s new in Python”

Lars Jencken gave a great update on what’s new in the Python ecosystem, and sent his notes to the list afterwards. Here they are verbatim:

PYCON AU 2014

• Being held in Brisbane in August 1st – 5th
• Travel grants are now available
• Upcoming call for proposals for a 1-day data science workshop beforehand

PYTHON 3 RUMBLINGS

• Steven Goss: “Python 3 is Killing Python“
• Drew Crawford: “Python 3 is Fine”
• For reference, “http://python-notes.curiousefficiency.org/en/latest/python3/questions_and_answers.html”

TRENDING REPOS

• Check Github’s monthly or weekly trending repos for Python

JOBS

• Software Developer, Biarri
• Short term network engineering role, Python Charmers (ed@pythoncharmers.com)
• 6-month role at Medibank (more details?)

2. Machine learning with Pandas and scikit-learn

Chris Hausler has put up the slides and ipython notebook from his talk.

3. pyenv

Tim Asquith introduced us to pyenv, for managing different versions of Python; for example, for testing an application against different Pythons.

For example:


pyenv install 3.4.1

pyenv shell 3.4.1


Some random notes:

• You can autoswitch between Python versions
• There is support for virtualenv
• It works with Jenkins

4. Coming up

The next MPUG meeting is Jul 7, 6pm at Inspire 9. Bernie Pope will be speaking on “Implementing Python in Haskell, twice!”

There is an open science workshop on July 19.

The Science & Data miniconference organisers for PyCon AU 2014 are pleased to announce the call for proposals is now open!

The Science & Data miniconf is a one day conference held on Friday, August 1, 2014 in Brisbane as part of PyCon Australia.

The miniconf is dedicated to talks related to science and data analysis and, as a community conference, we are keen to hear from people in the community who would like to present a paper related to science or data analysis using Python.

We welcome proposals of all kinds, from all kinds of speakers: first-time through to experienced speakers. There will be short (20 – 25 minute) talks as well as longer 45 minute talks and 5 minute lightning talks (which you don’t have to register a proposal for).

Presentation subjects may cover applications of science, engineering, mathematics, finance, and data analysis using Python, including AI and ‘big data’ topics, either academic or commercial. Formats may be either tutorials or case studies.

The deadline for proposals is June 20, 2014.

If you have friends or colleagues who have something valuable to contribute, twist their arms to tell us about it! Please also forward this Call for Proposals to anyone that you feel may be interested.

To submit your talk proposal, please use the Science & Data miniconf CFP submission form.

See you in Brisbane in August!

Regards,
Graeme Cross & Ed Schofield; PyCon AU Science & Data miniconf convenors