SF Python Presentation Night - May 2019

On the second Wed of each month, join ~180 devs at SF Python's presentation night.

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

Short talk (10mins)

Write your first UI application with Python, Cristián Maureira

Do you know what does Desktop, Embedded, Mobile, Automotive, Medical and even Data Science applications have in common? I will give you the key to start using one of the most powerful cross platform framework to build user interfaces, the Qt project!, which now is officially supporting Python!

Cristián has been a Python enthusiast for more than 10 years, and due to his academic background he has been using it in different topics like Image Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Data Science, and Astrophysics. Currently he is a Software Engineer at The Qt Company working on the Qt for Python project.

Short talk (15 mins)

Using randomized controlled trials and AI to discover what makes a political ad persuasive, Valerie Coffman

Swayable is a platform for predicting the persuasive impact of content launched in January of 2018. During the 2018 midterm election cycle, we tested over 500 political ads and surveyed over 300k people. As a result, we've amassed the most extensive data set we know of that links videos to their persuasive power. This talk will give an overview of how we gather and analyze data using Celery and Pandas, and our ongoing work using image recognition and natural language processing to extract insights into how to make a successful video ad.

Valerie has a BS in Physics from Johns Hopkins and a PhD in Computational Physics from Cornell. She was CTO/CSO of Xometry, an online platform for on-demand manufacturing and is currently CTO and Co-founder of Swayable.

Short talk (15mins)

Make the Most of It: Negotiation and Self-Advocacy, Lusen Mendel

Feeling confident about your work doesn’t automatically make you good at advocating for yourself. Many competent engineers avoid negotiating offers, asking for raises, or talking with managers about desired work responsibilities. However, negotiation and self-advocacy are an important part of any healthy employment relationship, and will allow you to make the most of your professional opportunities. This session is helpful for anyone who wants to strengthen their self-advocacy skills. Based on Lusen's experience in engineering management and candidate coaching, you'll walk away with knowledge and confidence for your next employment conversation.

Lusen/they/them is Director of Interviewing at Karat. They founded a start-up and a non-profit many years ago, worked as an engineering manager at Rackspace and Indiegogo, and consult on organizational diversity, equity and inclusion. Lusen recently started DangoorMendel to level the corporate playing field and work directly with engineers on their interviewing and negotiation skills. Lusen speaks regularly about interviewing, hiring and management best practices.

Main talk (25mins)

Python Decorators and Diversions, Richard Haven

Python decorators are an easy way to add meta and mixin behavior to code. They can enhance functions, methods, and even whole classes. And once you can get your head around function variables, they are pretty straight-forward. With one exception. Learn how the mechanism works so you can add timing, caching, security, metrics, and more to any part of your code.

Richard Haven has been knocking about software development entirely too long. While able to explain what life was like before OOP, he is more interested in how Functional Programming resembles Structured Programming, and how to show useful correlations.

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

This event is produced by:

SF Python, a volunteers-run organization aiming to foster the Python Community in the Bay Area. Please check out their flagship event, PyBay2019, 4th Annual Regional Python Conference in SF on August 15-18.

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.