Recaps: October Hackathon, November Beginner's Workshop

November 29, 2011 | Tag: » Events

Idealab in Pasadena played host to a PyLadies hackathon this past October. Our very own Sophia has posted some great photos of the event over at her own site, backCODE – check them out!

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Lightning talks  at that hackathon were given by:

Ray T. on Unit Testing

Randall D. on easy Django deployment with Heroku

PyDanny on Painless Authentication and Registration

Emma S.: Hello world! A beginner’s Django App

Leo C.: Google App Engine

Ryan: Know your Time Complexities

Muchas gracias to Idealab, and especially to Joven Matias for their excellent hospitality.  Extra thanks to our wonderful volunteer corps, who came early, helped set up the rooms, and delivered lightning talks!


USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism hosted a beginner’s Python workshop that was even bigger than the first one we held back in May. 50-odd geeks, nerds, and similar fought their way through some unexpected downtown traffic to attend this tutorial, taught by PyLadies kjam, Sandy, and xtine.

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It was a bright crowd, with most people Learning Python the Hard Way at a fairly rapid clip. They were impatient to learn about web scraping from kjam, and eager to follow along with the code samples presented at the end-of-day lightning talks.

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Photos from this event are up on our Flickr page! BIG thanks to Geneva Oh of USC Annenberg and Prof. Robert Hernandezfor proposing, organizing and promoting this workshop for USC students and journalists (including one intrepid nerd-to-be who flew in from Arizona solely for this event!), as well as sponsoring the venue and food.

Lightning talks from

xtine: scraping data from a music website for fun!

Michael: Why Documentation Matters

Robin: Python List Comprensions [.ppt]

Emma: “Hello world!” (an encore by popular demand)

Leo: I can’t remember at the moment but I’m sure it was fabulous!

Cars.com generously hosted a post-workshop PyLadies social hour, plying us with beer and delicious appetizers from the campus bar. Thanks to Michael and Robin from Cars for giving up their Saturday for us!  Likewise to our brilliant volunteer corps – the event would not have been as successful without your participation and we are grateful! =)

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We hope to follow up with some Intermediate Python workshops in the coming months for those who want to level-up some more, so stay tuned – subscribe to our newsletter (use the form at right) and follow us on the Twitter!

By Esther Nam

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