Bitten by Python
- Speaker: Vijay Kumar B
Vijay recollects how he came across Python while he was still in college. He had started playing with the language by writing small, simple scripts. He talked about how he wrote a Python script for parsing a log file for debugging an issue on his first day at work. He grieved about how indentation came to bite him at the wrong time. He showed a few code snippets to highlight the mistakes that he had committed. These mistakes made him rethink as to whether or not Python was "the" language he wanted to work with.
He highlighted the importance of unit testing and how it helps uncover all sorts of bugs in code. He also discussed a few unit testing tools and their possible use cases.
My Python-BCI Journey
- Speaker: Kannan
Kannan had attended the meetup for the first time in February. He mentioned how he was able to easily pickup Python and that being the reason why he loves the language a lot. He started off by introducing the concept of BCI and EEG. He showed a clip from NGO's Brain Games series. He also demonstrated a simple brainwave reading using an external kit and the OpenVibe Designer in Windows.
Python Scripting with SL4A
- Speaker: Sivasubramanyam
Siva talked about writing simple python scripts on an android device using the SL4A scripting layer. He talked about how a script he wrote could potentially replace a timelapse photography app. He gave a short demo where he was able to listen to an event on a website and trigger an action on his android device using SL4A.
How emacs and orgmode replaced a few apps in my workflow
- Speaker: Kiran Gangadharan
Kiran talked about how he valued privacy and keeping his data to himself instead of delegating all of it to third party apps like Evernote and Trello. He demonstrated how he built a workflow to replace apps like Evernote, Trello, iCal using the famed org-mode in Emacs.
Up and Running with Apache Spark
- Speaker: Krishna Sangeeth
Krishna started out by talking about Big Data and Hadoop and how Hadoop wasn't the best solution to every problem. He talked about how inefficient it is to abstract every problem with a mapper and reducer. He provided a performance benchmark of Hadoop and Spark which clearly showed how Spark was way more efficient for handling big data. He also talked about the history of Spark and gave a brief introduction about it's architecture. At the end, he also provided a quick demo of using a Spark client in Python for Log Analysis.
Sentiment Analysis in Simple Steps
- Speaker: Sharmila G Sivakumar
Sharmila talked about the ease of exploring the NLP capabilities of Python with a few simple examples of sentiment analysis. She demonstrated how one could analyse movie reviews and infer whether or not the movie was worth watching. The examples included how a sentence could be tokenized, have their terms extracted, filtered to ignore stopwords(all, just, along, because etc.), analysed to infer the root word(Lemmatization) and classified into positive and negative reviews with Naive Bayes Classifier, using the nltk toolkit.
How to use Slack effectively
- Speaker: Gaurav Sehrawat
Gaurav gave a quick talk about how Slack based communication is the future and it's potential benefits over communication via mailing list. He reminded the audience about the ChennaiPy group on slack and provided the necessary instructions for obtaining a slack invite.
Closing Notes
Vijay thanked the speakers, Prof Amritanshu Prasad and the sponsors. He also talked a bit about the ongoing logo contest.
We had a small discussion about having our meetups on Sundays, to which there were some mixed reactions. Perhaps, this could be experimented with, in the future.
Finally, Vijay also suggested an idea of combining a meetup with the ruby group, and having general talks rather than language-specific ones. Nothing was finalised in the end.
Meeting Minutes by Kiran Gangadharan
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