Date: 22nd Feb 2020

Venue : VISA Inc, Bangalore

The planning for this had started way back in October or November of 2019 when we first got in touch with Vinay from Visa Inc. They were very passionate about having something to do on the Community front for Python and we at Bangpypers had our 100th meetup in the offing. So, preparations began.

We (Anirudh, Ritesh and I) toyed with a lot of ideas before zeroing in on the final agenda (And even that would go through unimagined changes on the D-Day, but what can you do 🤓 )

The final agenda that happened -

• Bangpypers/Visa Introduction and settling down
• Talk 1 - Anand Pillai - “Memoirs”
• Anand Chitipothu - “A Python Magic Show”
• Abdul M Raja - “Interpretable ML with Python
• Lunch
• Kartik (VISA) - “CPython”
• Open house session (from Pyladies and Pydata)
• Workshop - Data Science - Sasidhar Donaparthi
• Closing Remarks

Anand B Pillai, who started Bangpypers in 2005 spoke about the initial days and gave a stellar talk on the distribution of most active members on the Bangpypers mailing list and the timeline since 2005. He mainly used pandas and networkx in the demo and the talk was somewhat telling of users’ behavior over time in terms of using mailing lists and collaborations and indicated the possible usage of other means of mass communication.

A detailed post by Anand can be found here - https://blog.anvetsu.com/posts/bangpypers-python-100th-meeting-mailing-list-data-wrangling-visualization/

This was followed by a talk by another early Bangpypers member - Anand Chitipothu. He presented a “magic show” using Python - showing that it was possible to overwrite default functions and operations and also making the audience reverse-engineer the results he was displaying. It was a very interactive session.

The code repo for Anand C’s session can be found here - https://github.com/anandology/python-magic-show

Next Abdul M Raja gave a short but excellent talk about Interpretable ML using Python , where he spoke about SHAP and LIME among other methods. While we don’t have the material he presented, here’s a related talk of his from Pycon India 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECFkJLpQqCQ

The reason the Lunch section is especially mentioned above is because Visa provided us a stellar lunch and we’d like to thank them for it 😇

After the lunch, we had Kartik from Visa speak about his journey as an open source developer and a core contributer to CPython. It was most inspiring. He can be contacted on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tirkarthi.

This was followed by Pooja from Pyladies Bangalore talking about the brilliant community they’ve created and the importance of diversity and representation in a language community. They can be reached at - https://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Bangalore-Chapter/

The last session for the day was a Data Science Workshop conducted by one of Bangpypers’ most eminent regulars - Sashidhar Donaparthi. It was a packed session despite being one of the latter sessions. The material from that workshop is available as a part here - https://github.com/sdonapar/data_analysis_training (among other notebooks)

All in all, it was a very successful meetup and very important to us because it was the 100th Meetup for Bangpypers 😇 Thank you all for making it happen!