September Meet Minutes

The September Edition of the ChennaiPy meetup started with Vijay Kumar, the organizer, welcoming everyone and outlining the agenda for the evening.

Introduction to Django

Rajkumar Rajendran started off the talk with some history of Django. After that, he did a quick walk through of installing Django and using it to setup a basic project structure with SQLite as the database. He then went on to illustrating how a web server works and concluded with a small demo on setting up a hello world project with the framework.

Django REST Framework

It looks like the audience had a good dose of Django this time, thanks to the talk by Jagadish Kumar. He started off by talking about API's as a bridge between a client and server and then went on to explain the basic components of the Django REST framework. He then demoed a simple TODO application and showed us how he was able to easily add/remove functionality from the API by using Mixins that the framework provided, thus illustrating the concepts of a loosely coupled architecture.

Networking Tea Break sponsored by Clay Labs

Using G-Code Vis tools

I'm pretty sure that a lot of people were baffled by the title of this talk by Shakthi Kannan. But to all our surprise, it turned out to be an interesting insight into the jargons and processes in the world of 3D printing. Shakthi started out by explaining the basic components of a 3D printer. He talked about how one would go about printing something using an STL file. The STL file would be first converted into G-Code which could then be executed on a 3D printer to actually print the object. He then gave a quick explanation about various gcode instructions and metrics that could be fine-tuned by the user. He then showed us how an object shaped like a pyramid would be printed using YAGV(Yet Another G-Code Viewer). He also showed us how the final object would appear, using Blender. The generated model data using G-Codes could be compared with the actual data obtained from the printer to determine the accuracy of the process itself. He then concluded with a short and sweet Q&A session with the audience.

Building a Sublime Plugin using Python

Text Editors are amongst the biggest contributors of programmer productivity, and in this session, Gaurav Sehrawat talked about how one could extend the functionalities of Sublime Text, by building plugins for it in Python. Gaurav started off by demonstrating a few tips and tricks that make Sublime Text an awesome editor. He then went on to explain what Window/Text command was and how one could leverage them to build simple plugins for the editor. He demoed an event based API to search Google for autocompletion when typing something into the editor and concluded with a demo of printing better debug statements for python variables which included the displayed filename and line number along with the variable.

Python, Guido and Snakes

I guess that after a bunch of serious talks for the evening, Vijay thought that it was time for something light and refreshing. His talk title was concise enough to pique our interest, but obscure enough to shroud us in mystery. He started off by talking about Python and it's creator Guido Van Rossum(BDFL). He talked about how the name "Python" was inspired by Guido's love for Monty Python. And to all our surprise, he even showed us a small sketch from Monty Python's "The Flying Circus", which left us all laughing out loud!

Vote of Thanks

Vijay concluded the meeting by thanking the participants, speakers, volunteers, IMSc and the sponsors.

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