Analyze graphs with NumPy, learn recursion, and more!

On 9 Jan 2019, join ~180 devs at SF Python's presentation night and learn more about how you can use Python to hear awesome lightning talks, analyze graphs with NumPy, and learn about recursion!

If you'd like to present at future meetups, please submit your talk ideas here.

Our generous sponsor Yelp will also provide pizza and drinks for this evening.

PROGRAM

Lightning talks

• How to get a job/recruit talent in today's market, Alexandra Sullivan
• Introduction to Serverless, Upkar Lidder

Short talk(10min)

Bioinformatics SIG @ SF Python Project Nights, Reece Hart

Speaker Bio

Reece is a long-time computational biologist/bioinformatics professional and Python aficionado. He's the author of several open source foundational packages that enable reliable genome interpretation, all released through the biocommons. In past lives, he was CTO of a genomics-based medical practice, a ground-floor engineering leader at Invitae, a successful SF-based genetics diagnostics company, and a scientist in bioinformatics and protein engineering at Genentech. Eons ago, Reece earned a PhD in biophysics and MS in computer science.

Description

The San Francisco Bay Area is the epicenter of biotechnology and home to many of the world's most innovative biotech companies. Python is among the most frequently used languages for bioinformatics. SF Python is kicking off a bioinformatics special interest group in order to catalyze networking, mentorship, and coding. The SIG will meet monthly during SF Python project nights (3rd Wednesday of each month). Whether you're a bioinformatics professional, researchers, or aspirant, please come contribute to the structure and content of this nascent group.

Short talk(~10 mins + Q&A)

Numpy in Graphland, Sandeep Narayanaswami

Speaker Bio

Sandeep is a software engineer with a focus on data. At Capital One, he has worked on a variety of machine learning projects, and is currently building a synthetic data platform. He loves learning about and using math and algorithms and mathy algorithms, and wants to know more about functional programming.

Description

There is a well-known representation of graphs as matrices, and it turns out that many graph algorithms (think breadth-first search, for example) can be translated into operations on matrices. We will consider a few such translations from networkx into numpy, review performance implications, and discuss trade-offs in implementation.

Main talk (30 mins)

Recursion for Beginners: A Beginner's Guide to Recursion, Al Sweigart

Speaker Bio

Al Sweigart is a software developer and the author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, Coding with Minecraft, Cracking Codes with Python, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, and Making Games with Python & Pygame. These books are freely available under a Creative Commons license at https://inventwithpython.com.

Al enjoys haunting coffee shops, writing educational materials, cat whispering, and making useful software. He lives in San Francisco.

Abstract

Recursion has an intimidating reputation for being the advanced skill of coding sorcerers. But in this tutorial we look behind the curtain of this formidable technique to discover the simple ideas under it. Although recursion is an intermediate topic, beginners will be able to follow this talk.

We'll answer the following questions:

• What is recursion, and when is it a good idea and bad idea to use it?
• What's a stack, the call stack, and a stack overflow?
• What are all the confusing ways that recursion is commonly taught?
• Do some problems require recursion? Can recursion do anything a loop can't?
• What is memoization, and how does functools.lru_cache work?

This talk was originally given at North Bay Python 2018

AGENDA

6:00p - Check-in and mingle, with food provided by our generous sponsor!

7:05p - Welcome

7:30p - Door close

7:10p - Announcements, lightning talks and main talk

8:15p - More mingling

9:30p - Hard stop

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 Yelp for providing pizza, beer, and the venue for this Wednesday's meetup.

Yelp sees 89 million mobile users and 79 million desktop users every month. Keeping everything running smoothly requires the best and brightest in the industry. Their engineers come from diverse technical backgrounds and value digital craftsmanship, open-source, and creative problem-solving. They write tests, review code, and push multiple times a day. Come out and talk to them.