PyLadies Pune June meet up

The one thing I missed the most, in PyCon US, 2017, was my PyLadies Pune group.

We were hoping to contribute to projects individually and as a group for a long time now. For our June meetup, we planned to give a shape to this idea. Kushal and Sayan readily agreed to become mentors. Then started the long discussion about the format. We finally agreed instead of mentors offering us the ideas for projects, we should come up with it. The mentors will usher us to turn the project into reality.

Conducting a session on Data Science was another request/requirement. Shilpee Chamboli, the Data Science Engineer at Red Hat agreed to guide us. M.K Pai for introducing us to her. This the kind of support without which PyLadies cannot move forward. This time we returned to our old venue - Red Hat. Rupali did magic again to get us venue at “a not so long notice”.

11th June was the date fixed for the meetup. Shilpee was the first one to conduct the session “Exploring Data Science with Python Pandas”. I often find myself in the middle of a conversation of data science and I find myself unable to contribute much to it. I was hoping for this session to give me some insight to the puzzle called data science. I got more than what I was looking for. After an initial introduction, she asked us to download the data of the Titanic disaster from kaggle. We used the Jupyter notebook in the Azure notebook service. Thank you Shilpee for this insightful session.

I was up next. I shared my experiences from PyCon US. More than anything else, I wanted to give them a glimpse of the Python community, the spirit, diversity and above all, its welcoming nature. I asked friends there if they can share their thoughts on PyLadies, Python community in general. Though they shared different stories, the core thought remained that “It is important to give back to the community.”

My heartfelt gratitude to the lovely PyLadies, Lynn Root, Jackie Kazil, Carol Willing, Ewa Jodlowska) for their messages. A special shout out goes to my videographer Sayan. After the session, Rishika exclaimed, “Wow, you actually told them about us ”. It made my day.

Post lunch came the time to work on the projects. Sayan asked about the projects we wished to work on. The different project ideas were jotted down in the Etherpad page.

We ended the session on a hopeful note that we have some projects to work on, learn new things and progress. The first, billion dollar challenge, remains, “What will be the name of the project?”