Project Night at Metis

SF Python is bringing its Project Night to Metis. It's going to be an evening of getting your questions answered, sharing your knowledge, hacking, taking tutorials.

We are grateful our venue host Metis will be providing the featured tutorial + snacks and drinks for this event.

Important logistics

Many of you are accustomed to getting your dinner covered at Project Night. Since our host can provide snacks only, and I have been beyond busy organizing PyBay, the regional Python Conference, let's try a Chinese food drive for this evening's meet up and see where that takes us. We will let you know by 4p on Wed on the status of the food drive so you can make plans for dinner.

Who should attend?

• New to Python and want to work with other Pythonistas

• Experienced devs who want to hack on your work, personal or open-source projects

• Experienced devs who want to mentor others

• Anyone that's interested in our tutorial offerings

The plan:

6:00p Begin check-in

6:50p Introductions: tell us about your project and/or the kind of help you seek

7:00p Make yourself comfortable and start hacking, or attend one of the tutorials

9:30p Wrap up / Door close

Tutorials

Web scraping by Ling Kong

When you do data science projects, it's common to need to find data from the web. At Metis, one of our projects focused on data collection using web scraping and our students have done projects on predicting movie success, beer price, sports performance, torrenting activities and many other, using scraped web data.

In this tutorial, we will walk through the process of web scraping through several examples. You will learn to write your own script to retrieve and extract information programmatically using Python packages such as BeautifulSoup. With a scraper, you can collect data about housing prices through listing sites, you can get specific data of a list of jobs from craigslist, or you can get a large corpus of product reviews to play around. There are countess ideas for your personal passion project.

We will also explore ways to extract data from a website more dynamically using a web driver called Selenium. This will come handy when you encounter dynamically generated webpages and need to interact with log-ins or search bars, etc. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a fully functional Python web scrape that can step through a series of pages and extract useful data and organize them into a data frame ready for your machine learning models (black-magic)!

Not interested in the tutorials? Bring your own project to hack on or bring your burning questions and we will try to hook you up with devs that can help you out.

Hope to see you there!

SF Python is run by volunteers aiming to foster the Python Community in the bay area. Please consider making a donation to SF Python and saying a big thank you to Metis for providing snack, drinks, and the venue for this Wed's meetup.

Tickets Prices in USD

Schedule

April 19th, 2017

6:00pm – 9:30pm PDT
SF Python Project Night

6:00p Begin check-in

6:50p Introductions: tell us about your project and/or the kind of help you seek

7:00p Make yourself comfortable and start hacking, or attend one of the tutorials

9:30p Wrap up / Door close

Additional Information

There are a few spaces for bicycle inside - please carry your bike through the reception area as you enter the building. Once those slots are filled up, please park your bicycle outside the building.