Coming out of hibernation : PyLadies Pune chapter

It was 10th July, a rainy, lazy Sunday morning. It was a kind of day when you would want to spend some extra hour in the bed. I woke up with up a shrill sound of alarm and immediately it stroked me "oh today is 10th, the PyLadies meet up". It was an event for which we were planning for a long time. Had several meetings with Rupali Talwatkar.

That day was on of those very few days when Kushal was excused from all his daily household jobs (and I was happy about it!) because I wanted my speaker to get ready on time. I got ready and packed my event speaker with me and reached the Red Hat, Pune office. We went into " Harishchandraghar" (but not the hill fort) and made all the set-ups ready and running. Slowly the people started coming in. There were people from different fields - students, banker, programmer, lawyer and of course Red Hatters. What a vibrant community to be part of. We had 18 people as attendees. We started half an hour late ( remember lazy rainy Sunday morning).

photo courtesy : Chandan Kumar

I started the session with a Welcome note and an Introduction to what PyLadies is all about. As well as I had formally announced the rebooting of the Pune Chapter of PyLadies.

Then the next speaker Kushal took over. He was supposed to give a talk on Python Industry and Community. Instead of giving a formal lecture he let us peep into the Python world through his lenses. He gave us a photo ride of his album Pycon 2015 with all the stories behind it. So, we had Guido to Lynn Root to Nick everyone present through those pictures in our meet up :).

Everyone is not lucky enough to go to Pycon. So we planned the next video watching session. We chose this year's ending keynote by K Lars Lohn to be projected. It was a keynote of a lifetime. He has used his multi facet personality of a programmer, musician, teacher and a biker ( and without over doing any of it) as a tool to present a vision of life. The talk had everything from mathematics to music. More than a talk it appeared as a beautifully written poetry to me. The talk actually has given a new definition on how a talk should be given.

After having a quick lunch we had started our Self Introduction session. But unfortunately I had missed the initial part of it because by then 'lady Py' had made her grand entry to the 'PyLadies' event.

Then started our Python Workshop. After learning some basics Python program we tried our hands on python. Kushal gave us problem of implementing some part of the command free. The session made me realise that I should try to make my typing skill right first before I proceed on programming. But somehow I managed to finish the task quite fast (may be Py's crying for food made my productivity grow).

The post hands on session was primarily planning and discussion for the next PyLadies meet up and about our future goals. People came up with some nice ideas like hackathon, more video watching, some real life bug solving etc.

Overall the event went well. Before I end my post I should show my gratitude to few people :

Chandan Kumar for his help, guidance and advice for how to unite a community together.

Rupali for taking care of all the management issues.

And last but not the least Siddesh.Without whom atleast 3 of the attendees would have not been able to participate. A big thanks to him for taking care of Py and Ira.

We have started the PyLadies Pune chapter a fresh. Together lets learn, have fun and make this Pune chapter of PyLadies a success. See you ladies at the next meet up.