Welcome to PyLadies Vancouver!

PyLadies is an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Our mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings.

At PyLadies Vancouver, we welcome people who have never programmed before, experienced programmers, and everyone in between. We welcome all women, inclusive of trans women. Further we would like to extend a special invitation to nonbinary folks, as many (but not all) of the oppressions facing women in our industry are also experienced by nonbinary individuals. Persons with any gender identity are welcome to attend our meetups, but should respect that PyLadies Vancouver is a place where women’s voices are centered.

Want to:

Code of Conduct

Everyone attending PyLadies Vancouver are expected to abide by our Code of Conduct.

Contact

Organizers

Current organizers are: Aliya, Kiri, Caroline, Meghan, Maris, Holly, Karey, Eliza, and Mariatta.

License

CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Resources

Meetup Formats

We have three meetup formats: Code Jams, Talk nights, and Workshops.

Code Jam

Join us for a chance to practice your programming skills on some coding challenges, puzzles or pet projects. All skill levels are welcome!

This is unstructured. Anyone can come with their own project, or pair with others. Bring your own laptop.

Talk nights

A night of talks from our community! Talks can be 5 minutes, 10 minutes, conference talk practise. We love first-time speakers!

We are always looking for speakers! Please fill in the Speaking at PyLadies Vancouver form if you’re interested in speaking at our meetup.

Check the talks page for a list of past talks.

Workshops

Hands-on tutorial with varying skill levels.

We are always looking for speakers! Please fill in the Workshop at PyLadies Vancouver form if you’re interested in leading a workshop at our meetup.

Check the workshops page for a list of past workshops.

Talks

A list of past PyLadies Vancouver talks.

We are always looking for speakers! Please fill in this form and we’ll get back to you.

You can also suggest a talk topic.

June 5th, 2019

May 15, 2019

Best of PyCon US 2019.

We watched and discussed the following talks from PyCon US 2019:

March 11, 2019

Best of Women of Data Science 2019.

We watched and discussed several talks from Women of Data Science 2019.

Feb 21, 2019

Best of PyCascades 2018.

We watched and discussed the following talks from PyCascades 2018:

Feb 14, 2018

  • Research and Education with Project Jupyter and Q&A, Fernando Pérez

June 12, 2017

April 26, 2017

  • Resources for Python beginners, Irene
  • F-strings, Mariatta Wijaya
  • VCR.py, Holly Becker
  • How to build a self-driving mouse, Kiri Nichols
  • Divided market for x86 computers that run a Microsoft operating system: late 1970s/early 1980s vs 2010s., Brolin Empey

January 31, 2017

March 7, 2016

  • Webscraping (BeautifulSoup, PhantomJS/Selenium), Maris Lemba
  • Experiences at DataPalooza, Lois Patterson
  • Data analysis with Pandas and Jupyter, Alex Kim
  • Code Tour, Dan Mayhew
  • Simulating stochastic systems, Quentin Caudron
  • Neural networks are (usually) amazing!, Kiri Nichols

November 19, 2015

  • Recruiting women in the software industry, Angela Bortolussi
  • machine learning with python: sklearn, Kiri Nichols
  • Recurse Center Review, Caroline Liu
  • Python Implementations, Snakes all the way down, Holly Becker

September 10, 2015

Python Modules Exploration

Interested Pythonistas will present on Python Modules of interest. For inspiration, see the effbot archives: http://effbot.org/zone/

Module presenters:

  • Larissa Feng - subprocess and/vs os.system
  • Lewis Nicolle - Kivy
  • Christie Wilson - itertools
  • Brett Cannon - importlib

July 9, 2015

Open Source Project Exploration

Interested pythonistas in the group will give an overview and brief code exploration of open source projects we may be interested in contributing to:

  • Christie - cpython
  • Holly - Anki, Django, maybe more!
  • Rebecca - Possibly a presentation on a project, definitely some open source project advice from the Systers community.

Workshops

A list of past PyLadies Vancouver workshops.

We are always looking for speakers! Please fill in this form and we’ll get back to you!

Hands-on Intro to aiohttp

When: April 26, 2018

Lead by: Mariatta

Resource: https://us-pycon-2019-tutorial.readthedocs.io/

Skill level: Intermediate

Asyncio is a relatively new feature in Python, with the async and await syntax only recently became proper keywords in Python 3.7. Asyncio allows you to write asynchronous programs in Python. In this tutorial, we’ll introduce you to an asyncio web library called aiohttp.

aiohttp is a library for building web client and server using Python and asyncio. We’ll introduce you to several key features of aiohttp; including routing, session handling, templating, using middlewares, connecting to database, and making HTTP GET/POST requests. We’ll provide best practises in building your aiohttp application, as well as how to write tests for your application.

We’ll use all new Python 3.7 features to build web services with asyncio and aiohttp.

Skill level: Intermediate This tutorial assumes some experience programming with Python, REST APIs, git, GitHub, and installing Python packages using pip.

Bring your own laptop, with your favorite IDE, text editor, and Python 3.7 pre-installed.

Intro to Data Analysis in Python

When: July 7, 2018

Lead by: Jennnifer Walker

Resource: https://jenfly.github.io/pydata-intro-workshop/

Skill level: Beginner Level.

A little bit of previous experience with Python or another coding language would be helpful, but not required!

In this workshop, you will develop skills with powerful data analysis tools from Python’s rich ecosystem of libraries. If you’re wrestling with spreadsheets on a regular basis and want to find better ways to analyze and visualize your data, handle messy and missing data, and automate repetitive tasks, this workshop is for you. If you’re coming from another data analysis environment (R, Matlab, etc.) and/or you’re a Python enthusiast who is curious about Python’s data analysis capabilities, this workshop is also for you!

Working with real-world data and the Pandas library, you’ll learn how to load data from a comma-separated values (csv) file, quickly summarize it from many different angles, and visualize it in graphs—all with just a few lines of code. You’ll also learn how to dive into the data for a deeper analysis with techniques such as subsets, filters, text processing, and aggregation.

You’ll want to bring your laptop for lots of hands-on practice as we work through the lessons and exercises. We’ll be using Python 3.6, Jupyter Lab, numpy, pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn. I highly recommend using Anaconda to set up your environment, especially if you’re new to Python and/or data analysis is your main reason for using Python.

Build-a-GitHub-Bot Workshop

When: May 5, 2018

Lead by: Mariatta

Resource: https://github-bot-tutorial.readthedocs.io

Skill level: Intermediate

This workshop assumes some experience programming with Python, REST APIs, git, GitHub, and installing Python packages using pip.

GitHub provides a great platform for collaborating. You can take it to the next level by creating custom GitHub bots. By delegating some of the chores to a bot, you get to spend more time developing your project and collaborating with others.

Learn how to automate your workflow by building a personal GitHub assistant for your own project. We’ll be using Python 3.6, gidgethub, and aiohttp libraries.

Face Detection with Python and OpenCV

When: January 5, 2018

Lead by: Kiri Nichols

Resource: https://github.com/pyladies-vancouver/facetrack

Ever wanted to learn to do face detection with Python? This tutorial will cover how to use the OpenCV package to work with images and video. Whether you’re a complete beginner or a total Python fiend, this tutorial is for you!

Python Packaging Workshop

When: October 25, 2017

Lead by: Brett Cannon

Resource: https://snarky.ca/a-tutorial-on-python-package-building

pip install your-own-library

In this workshop, we will learn all about Python packaging: what is it for, what are the formats, what tools are available, and what the future holds. We’ll go through the process of publishing a package using flit. Bring your own laptop to follow along.

All skill levels welcome!

Intermediate Git Tutorial

When: November 17, 2016

Lead by: Holly Becker

Used git, but only a little? Want to know more about collaborating with other people? Come to our git tutorial!

This will be an intermediate level git tutorial. It assumes you know how to do the basics, like create a repository, add and commit files, and what a branch might be useful for. If you’ve used git for your own projects but haven’t used it when collaborating with other people, this is for you! If you’re brand new to git, we’ll be reviewing the basics at the beginning. If you’re a git expert, feel free to come and share you expertise!

Topics we’re hoping to cover:

  • Branches
  • Merging & Rebasing (and why you might pick one over the other)
  • Git visualizers

Art with Python and Facial Recognition

When: April 9, 2016

Lead by: Kiri Nichols

This painting from Doctor Who has the nifty property of being able to adjust he perspective according to the position of viewers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUIbq2HPyQA

Cool, eh? Let’s try to do this with Python! Starter code is on github: https://github.com/small-yellow-duck/timelordart

With the magic of face detection in openCV, we can use a camera to track the position of viewers.

https://realpython.com/blog/python/face-detection-in-python-using-a-webcam/

There are several python libraries for rendering 3d objects. Let’s try a few of them out!

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Vapory/0.1.0

http://www.pythonocc.org/quick-examples/hello-dumb-box/

Some problems you might wish to consider:

  • how long does it take to render an image?
  • what should happen if the face recognition algorithm doesn’t find a face in the frame?
  • what should happen if the face recognition algorithm finds more than one face in the frame?

Intro to Testing and Test Automation in Python

When: February 2, 2016

Lead by: Christie Wilson

Resource: https://github.com/keeppythonweird/catinabox#catinabox

This is a repeat of the testing tutorial we presented in October. We’ve made a few tweaks to the format, with more focus on pytest and less on system testing.

Please bring a laptop if you can. When we’re closer to the date we’ll give you more info on the requirements (still trying to iron out the setup portion of the tutorial!), but for now:

  • Create a github account if you don’t have one already
  • Setup your github SSH key
  • Install python 2 or 3 with pip and virtualenv
  • Install git
  • Have a text editor or IDE

Intro to Testing and Test Automation in Python

When: October 1, 2015

Lead by: Christie Wilson

Hands on python testing tutorial! Should be about 2 hours long.

Bring a laptop if you can (or be prepared to pair).

Prereqs:

  • Create a github account if you don’t have one already
  • Install python 2 or 3 with pip and virtualenv
  • Install git
  • Have a text editor or IDE

Community Partnerships

Thank you to our community partners!

PyCascades

https://www.pycascades.com

PyCascades gave away a number of free registration tickets to members of PyLadies Vancouver. Our members also spoke at, and helped organize PyCascades 2018.

North Bay Python

https://northbaypython.org

PyLadies Vancouver received two free tickets to North Bay Python 2017.

Sponsoring

Thank you for your interest in sponsoring and hosting Vancouver PyLadies. We several formats: talk nights, workshop, and code jams. Checkout the formats page for more details.

For code jam or workshop, everyone will be using their own laptop, so a venue with tables or a boardroom will work best.

For talk nights, no tables necessary, but enough seating space for up to 30.

For code jams, tables, wifi and plentiful power plugs.

A projector is needed for workshops and talk nights.

For food, we try to budget at least $8 per person. On average, we have 20-30 people show up.

Please fill in the Hosting Vancouver PyLadies form to help us plan whether your venue will be suitable for our talk nights, workshop, or code jams.

Everyone attending PyLadies Vancouver are expected to abide by our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Vancouver/about/

Any questions, please email vancouver@pyladies.com

Thank you to our past and ongoing sponsors!

Organizer Guide

One of the hard part in sustaining a meetup is organizing the events. Our organizers are also juggling a full-time job, families, and other important commitments. Personal situations can change, and organizers may step down.

By providing this resource, we hope to provide transparency of what’s involved in organizing Vancouver PyLadies meetups, as well as providing learning resource and guidelines to our future organizers.

Organizing the Meetup

Each of our organizers self-organize. Usually one person would take charge for organizing one meetup, and the others will provide support. Take turns organizing!

  1. Decide on the format

    We try to meet once a month, alternating the format. If we’ve just done a code jam, it would be desirable that the next meetup be a talk night or a workshop.

  2. Decide on host and co-host

    Have at least one host and a co-host to balance and spread the workload.

  3. Find presenters, if doing talk night or workshop

    Sometimes the presenters come to us, sometimes we have to find and ask them to present. We now have several forms to make it easier for folks who has presentation ideas.

  4. Find a venue

    Once the format has been decided, it’s time to find a venue that is suitable for the format of the meetup. The sponsor page has more details of what’s required of each format.

  5. Schedule the meetup

    Create the event on meetup.com. Decide on how many RSVPs to accept (usually only half shows up). Check if the venue has specific instruction for getting in. If there’s food sponsor, it might be a good idea to survey for people’s dietary needs. In this case we should set expectation and be clear that we can’t accommodate everything.

  6. Announce the meetup

    Announce the meetup using @pyladiesvan twitter account, as well as sharing the event in #vancouver PyLadies Slack channel. Try to annouce the meetup at least 2 weeks in advance.

  7. Order food, if we have food sponsor

    In the past, we’ve ordered from: Dominos, Uncle Fatih, Nuba, Banana Leaf, Bali Thai, and at one time, one box of Timbits.

    We don’t always have food budget.

Presenter Guideline

Talks can be any length, from a 5 min lightning talk to a 30 min practice of a conference presentation.

Talks should:

  • [ ] Be related to the tech industry, preferably Python
  • [ ] Not a pitch, marketing or recruitment tool
  • [ ] Follow Code of Conduct

Ideas include but are not limited to:

  • walkthrough of a problem you solved recently
  • demo of a project you’re working on
  • summary of your favourite Python library
  • guide to how you got to your current technical skill level (including beginner!)
  • discussion of how software affects your field or anything

Ask about speaker preferences, such as:

  • Are you taking any questions?
  • Are you OK with people raising hands during the talk, or should they wait until the end?
  • Do you have a Twitter account so we can credit you?
  • Are you OK to be photographed?

Working with the Venue

We have a list of venues we’ve worked with. It would be best to start contacting the venue one month in advance. Some venues also host meetups for other groups, and they can’t always be available for the date we want.

Sometimes we may need to reach out to new venues. The following email template might be useful:

Hello,

I'm {{ name }}, one of the organizers of Vancouver PyLadies meetup.

We're looking for a space to host our {{ format }} for {{ date }}.
Please let me know if this is something that {{ company }} can accommodate?

PyLadies is an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women
become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Our
mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through
outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings.

Our meetup page is at: https://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Vancouver/

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards,
{{ name }}
PyLadies Vancouver

If your first attempts don’t work, contact other tech companies in your town. Post messages on job boards, tech conference websites, or on other tech Meetup channels.

Vancouver Public Library also provide free meeting rooms for non-profit organizations.

Some things to look for when choosing a venue:

  • [ ] Wifi that allows more than HTTP (eg SSH, rsync, FTP etc)
  • [ ] Washrooms
  • [ ] Plates, glasses, cutlery for dinner
  • [ ] Seating for up to 30
  • [ ] Accessible (wheelchair etc)
  • [ ] Near transit
  • [ ] Doesn’t need front door runner, can get in via unlocked door or buzzer (optional)
  • For talk nights:
    • [ ] Projector
    • [ ] Mic (optional)
    • [ ] Podium (optional)
  • For Code Jams:
    • [ ] Tables to sit at
    • [ ] Lots of power outlets
  • [ ] Twitter handle (optional, so we can thank you on Twitter for sponsoring)

Food Sponsorship

For food sponsorship, we budget around $8/person for dinner. We usually have 15-30 people show up, and assume half of the RSVPs on Meetup will attend.

There are 3 options for handling food:

  1. PyLadies organizer does the ordering and the sponsor reimburses
  2. PyLadies organizer plans the order and the sponsor pays
  3. Sponsor handles ordering and payment

When ordering food, remember to include the following options:

  • Meat
  • Vegetarian
  • Gluten free, if possible
  • Dairy free, if possible
  • Vegan, if possible

We also like to get sponsor’s Twitter handle so we can thank them online!

Sometimes we may need to reach out to potential food sponsors, especially if the hosting venue can’t cover food. The following email template might be useful:

Hello,

I'm {{ name }}, one of the organizers of Vancouver PyLadies meetup.

We're looking for a company to sponsor dinner for our {{ format }}. We usually
budget around $100-$250. We'd thank {{ company }} on our meetup page and during the
event for their support. Is this something {{ company }} is interested in doing?

PyLadies is an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women
become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community. Our
mission is to promote, educate and advance a diverse Python community through
outreach, education, conferences, events and social gatherings.

Our meetup page is at: https://www.meetup.com/PyLadies-Vancouver/

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards,
{{ name }}
PyLadies Vancouver

Meetup Logistics

To be completed.

Day of meetup checklist

Pre-meetup preparation

  • [ ] Order food
  • [ ] Have Nametags
  • [ ] Print door sign

Opening remarks

  • Welcome, you all belong here!
  • What is PyLadies
    • Events: Talks, Tutorials, Hands-on workshops
  • Code of Conduct review
    • Please read our Code of Conduct
    • Highlight common mistakes
      • Well-Actuallys - minor corrections irrelevant to the speaker’s main point
      • Subtle -isms - “So easy even my grandmother could do it!”
      • Feigning Surprise - “You don’t know about X?!”
    • Any concerns or violations can be reported to vancouver@pyladies.com or anonymously via MeetUp’s About page.
    • Mistakes happen, and we are not here to blame and shame, but to learn and grow.
  • Logistics
    • Name tags and Photos (red means no photos)
    • Bathrooms locations
    • WiFi password
  • Community Annoucements
    • Upcoming conferences
    • Upcoming conference proposal deadlines
    • Other useful meetups happening
  • Thank sponsors of food & space

Closing remarks

  • Thank space & food sponsors
  • Thank everyone for showing up
  • Announce next meetup, and ask for speakers if relevant

New Organizer checklist

  • [ ] Invite to PyLadies Slack team
    • [ ] Add to #vancouver-organizers
    • [ ] Add to #yvr-mail
    • [ ] Add to #vancouver
    • [ ] Welcome them!
  • [ ] Add them as Co-organizer in meetup.com
  • [ ] Share planning docs
  • [ ] Add to pyladies-vancouver GitHub team
  • [ ] Answer any questions

Credits

This guide draws much inspiration from the Write The Docs Organizer’s Guide and Django Girls Organizer’s Guide.

Readme

Online resources for PyLadies Vancouver meetup.

Building the documentation locally

To build the documentation locally:

  1. Clone the repository.

    git clone git@github.com:pyladies-vancouver/pyladies-vancouver.git

  2. Install sphinx.

    pip install Sphinx

  3. Build the documentation.

    make html

  4. View the output at: _/build/html/index.html.

License

CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Code of Conduct

Everyone attending PyLadies Vancouver are expected to abide by our Code of Conduct.