Surprisingly, the February Bangpypers meetup witnessed a whooping crowd of 46 Puys attending it. The LinkedIN office space where it was being held, had to be modified a little in order to accommodate everyone comfortably. The meetup was in the form a full-day hands on beginner level Python workshop. It was facilitated by Haris Ibrahim K. V. The agenda was to work through problems, thereby introducing and teaching Python. Kracekumar, Siva, Sayan and Souradeep came forward willingly to help the participants out whenever they had any doubt.

The workshop, which was supposed to commence at 10:00AM, got delayed by half an hour as people were pouring in one after the other. It started off by teaching everyone to fly with Python by importing ‘antigravity’. After the initial gimmick was done with, the customary “Hello world” program was written, comparing it with the way it would be if this was a beginner Java or C workshop. God forbid.

The instructor used a library book storing application as an exercise that was continuously built upon during the duration of the course. He had another set of questions which were used to demonstrate and understand certain specific concepts. The audience had a mix of absolute Python beginners as well as others who had a little bit of experience using it. The willingness to learn along with their warm and friendly nature gave the gathering a pleasant atmosphere both in terms of learning Python as well as interacting during the session.

The topics covered included:

• Working with the basic data types
• Understanding Data structures well such as dictionaries, lists and tuples
• Control flow statements including if, for loop and while loop
• Writing functions and understanding parameter passing
• File IO
• A short introduction to writing classes

The workshop finished around 3:30PM. Everyone hung out for a while discussing the various areas where Python was used, the various resources to learn Python from followed by a short talk by LinkedIN on where they were using Python and how. Everyone collected the cool t-shirts LinkedIN was giving away and parted, looking forward to the next meetup.