Hi Melbourne Pythonistas,

The weather and lack of agenda conspired to make todays PUG little, cosy,
and freeform. I don’t know what *everyone’s* experience of it was, but I
had some very interesting discussions with various attendees. I hope you
all got something out of it! (And I hope everyone signed up to this list!)

Here are some of the things we discussed:

- PyCon-Australia <https://2016.pycon-au.org/> is in Melbourne this year
and coming very soon! Aug 12-16, at the Melbourne Convention Centre.
Evidently it’s sold out but you can write to [email protected] to get
added to the waitlist, as well as to attend the miniconfs, which still have
some tickets. If you’re a student, you can also ask about financial
assistance. The deadline for that also passed but someone might be able to
help you out.

- SciPy 2016 <http://scipy2016.scipy.org/> was in Austin last month and it
was spectacular. There is a YouTube playlist
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYx7XA2nY5Gf37zYZMw6OqGFRPjB1jCy6>
containing
all the talks. I can recommend the Numba and parallel computing tutorials,
(possibly) the scikit-image tutorial by yours truly, Matt Rocklin and Jim
Crist’s talk on Dask for distributed computing, and Dan Allan’s talk on
asyncio, among others. Most of these have slides/repositories online.

- [*Sponsored Link* =P] If you are learning Python for science, as some
attendees were, you could do worse than Elegant SciPy
<http://elegant-scipy.org>, written by myself, Harriet Dashnow of the
Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (at the Royal Children’s Hospital),
and Stéfan van der Walt, creator of scikit-image and currently a fellow at
the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. The book is in pre-release so we
are still finalising repos and URLs, so you’ll need to access the data
files here: https://github.com/elegant-scipy/elegant-scipy-data. Follow
@elegantscipy <https://twitter.com/elegantscipy> on Twitter for updates!

- The book is aimed at people with *some* programming experience. If you’re
just getting started, Software Carpentry <http://software-carpentry.org/> has
some fantastic beginner materials, completely free to use.

- If you want to get into Python development and are happy to donate your
time, there is just an enormous number of exciting open source projects
that could use your help, regardless of your level of ability. Find a
project you’re excited about, lurk on their GitHub issues page, and find a
place to jump in! Some projects even create “easy” or “beginner” tags for
issues that don’t require heaps of Python expertise.

I’m probably missing things. Feel free to respond with more!

Thank you to everyone who came, and see you at PyCon and at next month’s
MPUG!

Juan.
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