PyDistrict

February Dojo

PyDistrict — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 18:46:24 GMT

A new year, a new Dojo -- join us for an evening of Python, food, and silly mistakes.

DC Python Dojo

Join us for an evening of Python coding, food, and silly mistakes.

The way it works is fairly simple:

6:30 - Everyone votes on a project to work on for the evening

6:45 - We break up into small groups to work on the problem

7:45 - Everyone comes back together for show & tell

8:00 - We adjourn to a local establishment to discuss what went right over beverages

March Meetup

PyDistrict — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:46:24 GMT

Let's kick off 2022!! Join us for our March meetup. We're going to keep it informal and have a few great discussions.

PyCon 2022 Preview

PyCon 2022 is coming up on April 29th in Salt Lake City. Come find out what to expect.

Functional Programming in Python

Vic Kumar will present an overview of the talk he'll be giving at PyCon 2022 on Saturday, April 30th.

November Meetup - Behavior Driven Development

PyDistrict — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 14:17:39 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Brian Sjoberg.

Brian Sjoberg - Let's Make Sure Our Product Behaves Like What the Customers Need

Have you ever heard the words, “That is not what I asked for?” Have you struggled with understanding the real needs of the user? Would you like to deliver a high-quality product that meets the user needs? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions then come join us for this presentation on what Behavior Driven Development is, its benefits, and how to do it in Python.

About Brian

Hi everyone! My name is Brian Sjoberg, I hail from sunny Florida where I earned my Computer Engineering degree from the University of South Florida. Go Bulls!! I am a former eXtreme Programming (XP) Java developer, turned Project Manager, turned Program Manager, turned Agile/Lean Coach. I have been living on the front lines of implementing Scrum, Kanban, and engineering practices for the past 14 years with multiple teams. I have coached both in the commercial and government space. I am fueled with a passion to help individuals, teams, and organizations frequently deliver high quality products at a sustainable pace that customers LOVE!! I love sharing what I have learned during my professional journey and have presented at the national and local level on many topics related to Agility.

September Meetup - Macro Keyboards with CircuitPython

PyDistrict — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 21:49:58 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Kevin Harris.

Kevin Harris - Macro Keyboards with CircuitPython

The process from designing to creating mechanical macro keyboards, including CAD, wiring, soldering, and coding.

About Kevin

Kevin Harris is a senior at Wilson High School in DC. He's on the robotics team and plans to study engineering in college.

June Meetup - Authorization using Python + SQLAlchemy

PyDistrict — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 21:49:58 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Sam Scott.

Sam Scott - Adding Structure to a Sea of Chaos: A principled approach to authorization using Python + SQLAlchemy

Authorization is an unstructured problem. Writing code to decide who can do what in your app can cover a broad set of cases. The most structure that typically gets applied to this problem area is a set of if statements and roles, but in reality, there are a lot more patterns and structure that we can apply. Oso is an open source batteries-included library for building authorization in your application. It's a bit like SQLAlchemy in that it provides a structured approach to authorization, much like SQLAlchemy does for data modeling and access. In this talk, we'll provide a mental model for authorization and show how to apply it using oso, Python and SQLAlchemy.

About Sam

Sam Scott is the cofounder and CTO of Oso. He’s received a PhD in Cryptography, is an engineer by training, and can discuss anything from authorization and security patterns in SQLAlchemy, to how oso works under the hood and interfaces with Python via FFI, to trends in security policy-as-code and his contributions to TLS 1.3.

You can find him on Twitter @samososos.

May Meetup - Probabilistic Programming using PyStan

PyDistrict — Mon, 17 May 2021 01:25:00 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Saran Ahluwalia.

Saran Ahluwalia - Probabilistic Programming using PyStan: Quantifying the business impact of adverse events on networks using device telemetry

Causal Inference has been greatly popularized in the past several years in both contemporary machine learning and in statistics. Applications include advertising campaigns, economic analysis and disaster recovery.

But what exactly is "causal inference"? From a statistician's perspective, it is the study of the consequences of the effects of individuals' actions. This is really important as one causal phenomena in your data can be more meaningful than dozens of correlation patterns in your data.

In this talk we will briefly discuss an application of causal inference to cybersecurity. Objectives in this talk include:

An introduction to Bayesian structural time series models
An introduction to probabilistic programming using Stan
How to construct hierarchical models that can capture more complex dynamics of systems
An introduction to network traffic analysis and its utility in impacting both cybersecurity and the science of causal inference

About Saran

Saran Ahluwalia is currently a Data Scientist working within the Advanced Security Initiatives group in Cisco. You can learn more about Saran here. You can also follow him and his ramblings on 1990s and 2000-era NBA basketball, COVID-19 policy and statistics (among other topics) on Twitter: @SaranAhluwalia.

April Meetup

PyDistrict — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 18:00:00 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Taylor Bird.

Taylor Bird - Blueprints for a Serpent

A survey of Python variants. Let's discuss that Python is a specification for a language of which cPython is just the most popular reference implementation. We'll talk at a high level about how this is possible and then we'll cover some examples of alternate implementations of Python, what they offer and why you might want to use them.

About Taylor

Taylor Bird software developer with Excella. He has roughly a decade long background in Java programming and software design for enterprise systems. His recent focus has been on data science, and he is mostly programming in Python these days for that.

Early April Lightning Talks

PyDistrict — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 23:39:17 GMT

It's an April two-fer! Join us for an evening of lightning talks. If you're interested in presenting, please reach out to the organizers on Meetup or the DC Tech Slack's #pydistrict channel.

Jim Taysom - Manage your Python environments with Pipenv

Pipenv combines virtual environments and package installation tools to make a simple workflow for having a consistent package installation experience. This will help prevent your computer from being declared a superfund site.

Aru Sahni - Pattern Matching

Python 3.10 is on the horizon. With it comes a new feature that has the internet abuzz - Pattern Matching. Learn why it exists, how it's used, and more!

Rami Chowdhury - Django-Ninja

Want to try FastAPI? Have an existing Django app? Learn how to bring Ninja skills to bear with Django-Ninja!

Vic Kumar - Functional Programming in Python

Ever hear your overzealous friend talking about "functional programming" and have no idea what they're talking about? We're going to try and bridge the gap and do a few functional examples in Python.

February Meetup

PyDistrict — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 23:20:59 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Will Angel.

Will Angel - Logging and Monitoring Python Applications

You've built your Python application and deployed it! Now what? Specifically, now what is your application doing and how do you monitor it. This talk will cover logging and monitoring Python applications using the Python standard library logging module and open source monitoring tools including Prometheus and Grafana. Learn the basics and best practices of application logging, and get an overview of the monitoring ecosystem that you can use to get better insights into the health and utilization of your Python apps.

About Will

Will Angel is a Data Scientist and Author, co-organizer for the Data Visualization DC meetup group, and helps lead communications and development for the Data Community DC non-profit. He has worked in consumer and healthcare startups, and has a background in bioethics and physics. Learn more at http://www.williamangel.net or on twitter at @DataDrivenAngel.

October Meetup

PyDistrict — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 02:17:39 GMT

Join us for our monthly virtual PyDistrict. We'll have one great speaker who'll be presenting: Ying Wang.

Ying Wang - Property Based Testing

This talk introduces property-based testing as a concept, and describes some ways you can start integrating PBT into your test suite.

Ying is a software engineer in DC; he enjoys Chipotle burritos, sunlight, and making computer fans spin loudly.