BangPypers
BangPypers The Bangalore Python User Group

May 2014 Meetup report

The May Bangpypers meetup happened at the Intuit office near Bellandur. Kracekumar facilitated the workshop. Haris Ibrahim K V, Sayan Chowdhury and Siva came forward as volunteers. The session started at 10:30AM and concluded around 4:30PM. Following this, we had the volunteers meeting for InPycon for which a few of the participants joined in as well.

The meetup was organized as a continuation to last month’s beginner-level problem-solving Python workshop. As such, it focused on the following intermediate topics:

  • Passing functions as arguments to functions
  • Decorators
  • Introduction to classes
  • Inheritance
  • Recursion
  • Unit Testing
  • Installing third party libraries
  • Using standard library and third party libraries

Find the exercises and solutions used for the workshop here: https://github.com/kracekumar/pythonbyexamplestutorial

As was the case for the past couple of meetups, 50 people attended. The entire cafeteria got occupied and we had to pull in chairs around the area to accommodate those few who were late to join the party. Krace started off by doing a quick recap of what was covered during the last meetup. Making sure everyone was on the same page, he jumped into functions. Slowly building upon one function after the other, he hand held the crowd to be prepared for the scarier parts that were to follow.

By the time decorators came into the picture, everyone had their brains working high. After giving a quick peek, lunch was served around 1:00PM. In spite of the 1 hour lunch break, surprisingly, everyone finished off the Subway Burrito in a hurry, took a swing of the Mango Juice served along with it, and were ready by 1:30PM for the session to continue. Fed and their brain’s chugging, we continued with decorators at 1:45PM.

Just before getting started, there was a special announcement. Daniel Roy Greenfeld, the co-author of Two Scoops of Django, had donated a copy of the new edition of his book to Bangpypers. We decided that the best way for the community to use the book would be to pass it on from person to person every month. Upon collectively agreeing to this norm, the book was awarded to its first keeper, Siva. Hopefully, the mantle will be passed on during each meetup from now on.

Finishing one part after the other, Krace made writing tests a parallel task from the beginning onwards. Giving a rock solid explanation on classes and its use, the workshop was concluded by 4:30PM. There were bonds strengthened, new friends made and good will spread around among the Puys all through the day. We shook hands and left, impatiently waiting for the next gathering.