51 Puys! The greatest turnout yet. There was not event one chair left unoccupied in the hall. The enthusiasm of such a large crowd does give us all a hint about the demand in the industry for beginner level Python training. With the organizer, Kracekumar himself facilitating the workshop, the in-depth beginner level session was received by the crowd with much appreciation. The April Bangpypers meetup happened at the Akamai office near Bellandur. Kartik, Haris and Sayan came forward as volunteers. The session started at 10:30AM and concluded around 6:00PM.

Kicking off the workshop by getting to know the crowd better, Krace quickly got into the exercises, thereby getting everyone hands-on. The workshop was structured as a series of exercises in folder, along with their respective solutions in another. The material was shared in advance with the audience. The instructor went over each exercise (which were separated into individual files) by first demoing the concept using the Python interpreter and then letting the audience try it out within the file. You can find the course content comprising of the exercises and solutions here.

The session was riddled with questions from the participants. Being a man of patience, Krace took all of them, refined them and gave a solid explanation along with all the answers. We broke for lunch at about 1:30PM. Akamai was generous enough to sponsor huge mean boxes consisting of rice, curries, sweets and a pack of juice. We wrapped up luch by 2:30PM, at the point which Akamai gave us a short demo of their world wide service. All of us were taken into a room that resembled the cockpit of a spaceship where on a huge screen, you could see the globe rotating, having streaks of green and yellow depicting Akamai’s realtime traffic, which apparently consisted of 40% of the world’s!

The workshop resumed at 2:45PM, continuing from list, dictionaries, list & dictionary comprehensions to files, error handling and standard libraries. The session covered all these and went on till about 6:00PM. Although that was more than the estimated time, the audience did not have the slightest of problems with the delay, due to the excellent workshop. Krace, having imparted the best practices, basic Python knowledge as well as the idiomatic approach to writing Python code, concluded his session by pointing them at other resources which they could follow up with as exercises.

At around 6:15, all of us parted, exchanging good-byes and wishing each other to meet within another month!