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- Coverage: Video
Wednesday 7th March 2012
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Bayesian statistics made (as) simple (as possible)
by Allen Downey
This tutorial is an introduction to Bayesian statistics using Python. My goal is to help participants understand the concepts and solve real problems. We will use material from my book, Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers (O’Reilly Media).
Bayesian statistical methods are becoming more common and more important, but there are not many resources to help beginners get started. People who know Python can use their programming skills to get a head start.
I will present simple programs that demonstrate the concepts of Bayesian statistics, and apply them to a range of example problems. Participants will work hands-on with example code and practice on example problems.
Students should have at least basic level Python and basic statistics. If you learned about Bayes’s Theorem and probability distributions at some time, that’s enough, even if you don’t remember it! Students should be comfortable with logarithms and plotting data on a log scale.
Students should bring a laptop with Python 2.x and matplotlib. You can work in any environment; you just need to be able to download a Python program and run it.
Outline:
- Bayes’s theorem.
- Representing probability distributions.
- Bayesian estimation.
- Biased coins and student test scores.
- Censored data.
- The locomotive / German tank problem.
- Hierarchical models and the hidden species problem.
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Faster Python Programs through Optimization
by Mike Müller
This tutorial provides an overview of techniques to improve the performance of Python programs. The focus is on concepts such as profiling, difference of data structures and algorithms as well as a selection of tools and libraries that help to speed up Python.
Objective
This tutorial provides an overview of techniques to improve the performance of Python programs. The focus is on concepts such as profiling, diffrence of data structures and algorithms as well as a selection of tools an libraries that help to speed up Python.
Intended Audience
Python programmers who would like concepts to improve performance.
Audience Level
Programmers with good Python knowledge.
Prerequisites
Please bring your laptop with the operating system of your choice (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). In addition to Python 2.6 or 2.7, we need:
- RunSnakeRun (http://www.vrplumber.com/program...)
- the Guppy_PE framework (http://guppy-pe.sourceforge.net)
- psyco (http://psyco.sourceforge.net, Python 2.6 only, version 1.5.2 or higher)
- pypy (http://pypy.org) and
- NumPy (http://numpy.scipy.org, version 1.2 or higher).
Method
This is a hands-on course. Students are strongly encouraged to work along with the trainer at the interactive prompt. There will be exercises the students need to do on their own. Experience shows that this active involvement is essential for an effective learning.
Outline
- How fast is fast enough? (10 min)
- Optimization guidelines (10 min)
- Premature optimization
- Optimization rules
- Seven steps for incremental optimization
- Optimization strategy (30 min)
- Measuring in stones
- Profiling CPU usage
- Profiling memory usage
- Algorithms and Anti-patterns (40 min)
- String concatenation
- List and generator comprehensions
- The right data structure
- Caching
- The example (5 min)
- Testing speed (5 min)
- Pure Python (15 min)
- Meet Psyco, the JIT (5 min)
- Using PyPy (15 min)
- NumPy for numeric arrays (10 min)
- Using multiple CPUs with multiprocessing (20 min)
- Combination of optimization strategies (10 min)
- Results of different example implementations (5 min)
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Introduction to Django
The Django framework is a fast, flexible, easy to learn, and easy to use framework for designing and deploying web sites and services using Python. In this session, we'll cover the fundamentals of development with Django, generate a Django data model, and put together a simple web site using the framework.
- Detailed Tutorial Outline
- Django Overview and Basic Introduction
- Downloading & Installing Django
- Creating a new project
- Choosing a database
- Creating a new application
- Installing & Using Django contrib applications
- Overview of Django flow (i.e., URLconf expression, view function, HTTPResponse object, etc.)
- Generating Simple Django Views
- Configuring a URLConf for basic views
- Creating Django Templates (template syntax, common filters and tags, loops, etc)
- Creating & using Template Context objects
- Introduction to Django Models
- Defining basic Django models
- Understanding basic model fields & options
- Generating & Reviewing Model SQL
- Adding data to a model
- Simple data retrieval using models
- Working with QuerySets (filters, slicing, ordering, common methods)
- Overview of Q objects)
- Using the Admin interface
- Using Generic views
- Access control with sessions & users
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IPython in-depth: high-productivity interactive and parallel python
by Fernando Pérez, Brian E. Granger and Min Ragan-Kelley
IPython provides tools for interactive and parallel computing that are widely used in scientific computing, but can benefit any Python developer. We will show how to use IPython in different ways, as: an interactive shell, an embedded shell, a graphical console, a network-aware VM in GUIs, a web-based notebook with code, graphics and rich HTML, and a high-level framework for parallel computing.
IPython started as a better interactive Python interpreter in 2001, but over the last decade it has grown into a rich and powerful set of interlocking tools aimed at maximizing developer productivity with Python while using the language interactively.
Today, IPython consists of a kernel that executes the user code and controls the user's namespace, and a collection of tools to control this kernel either in-process or out-of-process thanks to a well-specified communications protocol implemented over ZeroMQ. The kernel can do much more than execute user code, including introspection of objects in the user's namespace, detailed error reporting with rich tracebacks, history logging of inputs and outputs with an SQLite backend, a user-extensible system of commands for interactive control that don't collide with user variables, and much more.
Our communications architecture allows these same features to be accessed via a variety of clients, each providing unique functionality tuned to a specific use case. We expose a number of directly usable applications:An interactive, terminal-based shell with many capabilities far beyond the default Python interactive interpreter (this is the default application opened by the ipython command that most users are familiar with).
A Qt console that provides the look and feel of a terminal, but adds support for inline figures, graphical calltips, a persistent session that can survive crashes (even segfaults) of the kernel process, and more. A user-based review of some of these features can be found here.
A web-based notebook that can execute code and also contain rich text and figures, mathematical equations and arbitrary HTML. This notebook controls the same kernel as the other two applications, but instead of offering a linear, terminal-like workflow, it presents a document-like view with cells where code is executed but that can be edited in-place, reordered, mixed with explanatory text and figures, etc. This model is a kind of literate programming environment popular in scientific computing and pioneered by the Mathematica system, that allows for the creation of rich documents that combine computational experimentation and results with other explanatory elements. A detailed review of this system can be found here.
A high-performance, low-latency system for parallel computing that supports the control of a cluster of IPython engines communicating over ZeroMQ, with optimizations that minimize unnecessary copying of large objects (especially numpy arrays). These engines can be controlled interactively while developing and doing exploratory work, or can run in batch mode either on a local machine or in a large cluster/supercomputing environment via a batch scheduler.
In this hands-on, in-depth tutorial, we will briefly describe IPython's architecture and will then show how to use and configure each of the above components. We will also discuss how to use the underlying IPython libraries in your own application to provide interactive control.
An outline of the tutorial follows:
- Introductory description of the project and architecture.
- IPython basics: the magic command system, shell aliases, full shell access, the history system, variable caching, object introspection tools.
- Development workflow: combining the interpreter session with python files via the %run command.
- Effective use of IPython at the command-line for typical development tasks: timing, profiling, debugging.
- Embedding IPython in terminal applications.
- The IPython Qt console: unique features beyond the terminal.
- Embedding an IPython kernel in a GUI app to expose network-based interactive control.
- Configuring IPython: the profile and configuration system for multiple applications.
- The IPython notebook: interactive usage of the application, the IPython display protocol, defining custom display methods for your own objects, generating HTML and PDF output.
- Parallelism with IPython: basic architecture, interactive control of a cluster, standalone execution of applications, integration with MPI, blocking and asynchronous parallelism, execution in batch-controlled environments, IPython engines in the cloud (illustrated with Amazon EC2 instances).
A short listing of other features not covered in this tutorial, as guidance for users to later learn about on their own.
For full details about IPython including documentation, previous presentations and videos of talks, please see the project website.
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SQL for Python Developers
Relational databases are often the bread-and-butter of large-scale data storage, yet they are often poorly understood by Python programmers. Organizations even split programmers into SQL and front-end teams, each of which jealously guards its turf. These tutorials will take what you already know about Python programming, and advance into a new realm: SQL programming and database design.
The class will consist of six 25-minute lessons, each of which features a 10-minute lecture, 10 minutes of interesting exercises, and a 5-minute wrap-up in which the instructor recaps the exercises by giving his own answers. The focus will be on keeping things simple so that each building block is grasped clearly. The six lessons will be laid out something like this:
1. Tables, INSERT, and SELECT.
- Create a simple sqlite3 table with the DB-API interface provided by the Python Standard Library.
- Use INSERT to fill the table with data.
- Concatenate INSERT statements to increase the speed and reduce the number of database round-trips required during a bulk data load.
- Read back table rows with SELECT.
- Add dynamic expressions to the rows returned by SELECT.
- Quote values correct to avoid SQL injection attacks.
- Avoid “gotchya” differences between Python and SQL data types, with particular attention to Unicode, date-times, and the behavior of NULL verses None.
2. WHERE and the importance of being indexed.
- Run quick performance checks that demonstrate that WHERE usually requires the entire table to be read into memory and scanned.
- Add a simple index to shortcut specific WHERE clauses and return their results more quickly.
- Check whether an index is being used, and learn several reasons why apparently useful indexes get ignored by the database.
- Add aggregate indexes that yield performance increases for very specific WHERE clauses.
- Investigate how our data distrubtion — for example, whether a particular column has thousands of different values, or merely thousands of instances of a handful of values — can impact the wisdom and performance of various query plans.
3. FOREIGN KEY and JOIN
- Use a foreign key to relate rows in one table with rows in another.
- Add JOIN clauses to a SELECT statement to assemble query-result rows that are built from pieces of several tables.
- Diagnose performance problems with JOIN by observing the cost of full N×M scans that compare every row from one table with every row from another.
- Think about the indexes that a query plan could take advantage of behind the scenes.
- Create indexes that let the database take shortcuts when doing common JOINs.
4. Post-processing.
- Use ORDER BY to control the rows which are returned first by a given query.
- Combine OFFSET and LIMIT to return "paged" results suitable for displaying on a limited display, like a web page or GUI window
- Observe how indexes affect the performance of ORDER BY / LIMIT.
- Use GROUP BY to support aggregate operations such as sums, averages, maxima, and minima.
- Filter aggregate results with the HAVING clause.
The exercises will present small Python scripts that post-process data, and ask students to write the equivalent GROUP BY / HAVING expressions to remove the need for the Python post-processing.
5. Modifying tables.
- Write WHERE clauses for UPDATE and DELETE using the same patterns already learned for SELECT.
- Use transactions in combinations with UPDATE and DELETE to prevent inconsistent database states from becoming visible to other clients.
6. ORMs, Objects, and Tables.
- Create tables of objects using the SQLAlchemy declarative schema in combination with classes.
- Understand the main differences between SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM, including the idea of explicit saves versus a unit-of-work pattern.
- See how ORM query syntaxes mix down to SQL statements.
- Determine when an ORM will be helpful, versus when straight SQL might be a better solution for a particular problem.
Of course, mastery of these topics cannot be conveyed in a single three-hour course! The tutorial will have succeeded if students learn the main moving parts that are involved in a relationally-backed Python application, if they have gotten some practice with SQL and the kind of tasks that it seeks to simplify, and if they have a foundation upon which to build when they are next faced with writing or modifying Python code that interfaces with a SQL database.
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Writing a Pyramid application
by Carlos de la Guardia
Pyramid is the web framework at the core of the Pylons Project. It's a "pay only for what you eat" framework. You can get started easily and learn new concepts as you go, and only if you need them. It's simple, well tested, well documented, and fast. This course will present Pyramid and lead you through the creation of a an application as the concepts from the framework are introduced.
Pyramid is the web framework at the core of the Pylons Project. It’s a “pay only for what you eat” framework. You can get started easily and learn new concepts as you go, and only if you need them. It’s simple, well tested, well documented, and fast.
Though it’s in part inspired by Zope and uses concepts and software that may be familiar to Zope programmers, no prior Zope experience is required to use it. Also, unlike Zope, you don’t need to understand many concepts and technologies fully before you can be truly productive.
Pyramid is also inspired by Django and Pylons. It tries to learn valuable lessons from things that have gone well with different web frameworks and give the user great flexibility in applying them.
This course will present Pyramid and lead you through the creation of a an application as the concepts from the framework are introduced. The extensive Pyramid documentation will be used as “text book”.
Proposed outline:
- Installation
- Scaffolds
- Persistence options
- URL dispatch
- Views
- View configuration
- Renderers
- Static views
- Security
- Declarative configuration
- Testing
- Deployment
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Data analysis in Python with pandas
by Wes McKinney
The tutorial will give a hands-on introduction to manipulating and analyzing large and small structured data sets in Python using the pandas library. While the focus will be on learning the nuts and bolts of the library's features, I also aim to demonstrate a different way of thinking regarding structuring data in memory for manipulation and analysis.
The tutorial will teach the mechanics of the most important features of pandas. It will be focused on the nuts and bolts of the two main data structures, Series (1D) and DataFrame (2D), as they relate to a variety of common data handling problems in Python. The tutorial will be supplemented by a collection of scripts and example data sets for the users to run while following along with the material. As such a significant part of the tutorial will be spend doing interactive data exploration and working examples from within the IPython console.
The tutorial will also teach participants best practices for structuring data in memory and the do's and don'ts of high performance computing with large data sets in Python. For participants who have never used IPython, this will also provide a gentle introduction to interactive scientific computing with IPython.
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Django in Depth
A tutorial that goes beyond all other Django tutorials; we'll dive deep into the guts of the framework, and learn how each commonly-used component -- ORM, templates, HTTP handling, views and the admin -- work from the bottom up, covering both public and internal APIs in excruciating detail.
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How to get the most out of your PyPy
by Alex Gaynor, Maciej Fijalkowski and Armin Rigo
For many applications PyPy can provide performance benefits right out of the box. However, little details can push your application to perform much better. In this tutorial we'll give you insights on how to push pypy to it's limites. We'll focus on understanding the performance characteristics of PyPy, and learning the analysis tools in order to maximize your applications performance.
We aim to teach people how to use performance tools available for PyPy as well as to understand PyPy's performance characteristics. We'll explain how different parts of PyPy interact (JIT, the garbage collector, the virtual machine runtime) and how to measure which part is eating your time. We'll give you a tour with jitviewer which is a crucial tool for understanding how your Python got compiled to assembler and whether it's performing well. We also plan to show potential pitfalls and usage patterns in the Python language that perform better or worse in the case of PyPy.
We'll also briefly mention how to get your application running on PyPy and how to avoid common pitfalls there, like reference counting or relying on C modules.
This tutorial is intended for people familiar with Python who have performance problems, no previous experience with PyPy is needed. We ask people to come with their own problems and we'll provide some example ones. Attendees should have the latest version of PyPy preinstalled on their laptops.
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MongoDB and Python
by Rick Copeland and Bernie Hackett
This intermediate-level class will teach you techniques using the popular NoSQL database MongoDB, its driver PyMongo, and the object-document mapper Ming to write maintainable, high-performance, and scalable applications. We will cover everything you need to become an effective Ming/MongoDB developer from basic PyMongo queries to high-level object-document mapping setups in Ming.
The class will begin with a brief overview of MongoDB and its Python driver PyMongo. We will cover basic operations using PyMongo, including data manipulation, querying, and GridFS. Students will install MongoDB and PyMongo as part of this section.
We will then describe the design philosophy and setup of Ming, a SQLAlchemy-inspired object-document mapper (ODM) for MongoDB developed at SourceForge.
Next we will cover the base-level implementation of Ming, including schema design, the session and datastore, lazy migrations, data polymorphism, and GridFS support. We will also cover effective MongoDB index design, querying, and updating techniques, and how to use these with Ming. Students will install Ming as a part of this section, and have exercises covering schema design, lazy migrations, and GridFS.
The final segment will cover the object-document mapper portion of Ming. We will cover the unit of work design pattern, object relations, ODM-level polymorphism, and how to drop down to the base layer (or even down to pymongo) when you really need to. This section will include exercises in designing your ODM model and effectively using the unit-of-work session.
This talk targets Python 2.6-2.7 and MongoDB 2.0. Students should have Python 2.6 or 2.7 installed on their machines prior to the class and should be comfortable using virtualenv and pip or easy_install to install packages.
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Web scraping: Reliably and efficiently pull data from pages that don't expect it
Exciting information is trapped in web pages and behind HTML forms. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to parse those pages and when to apply advanced techniques that make scraping faster and more stable. We'll cover parallel downloading with Twisted, gevent, and others; analyzing sites behind SSL; driving JavaScript-y sites with Selenium; and evading common anti-scraping techniques.
- Basics of parsing
- The website is the API
- HTML is a mess, but we can parse it anyway
- Why regular expressions are a bad idea
- Extracting information, using XPath, CSS selectors, and the BeautifulSoup API
- Expect exceptions: How to handle errors
- Basics of crawling
- A quick review of HTTP
- Why cookies are necessary for maintaining a session
- How servers can track you
- How to submit forms with mechanize
- Debugging the web
- Comparing FireBug and Chrome's DOM Inspector
- The "Net" tab
- Using a logging HTTP proxy to record traffic
- Counter-measures, and how to circumvent them
- JavaScript
- Hidden form fields (e.g., Django CSRF)
- CAPTCHAs
- IP address limitations
- How to cover your scraping code with tests
- Why you should store snapshotted pages
- Using mock objects to avoid network I/O
- Using a fake getPage for Twisted
- Parallelism
- A quick tour of different models:
- Twisted
- gevent
- celery
- Handling JavaScript
- Automating a full web browser with Selenium RC
- Running JavaScript within Python using python-spidermonkey
- Conclusion
- Use your power for good, not evil.
- Q&A
Thursday 8th March 2012
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Documenting Your Project With Sphinx
Python projects can succeed or fail because of their documentation. Thanks to Sphinx, Python now has a “documentation framework” with indexing, syntax highlighting, and integration with your code. Students will be given a small undocumented Python package, and during the exercises they will give the package a tutorial and reference manual. Plus: deployment and theming!
Python projects can succeed or fail based on their documentation. Thanks to Sphinx, Python now has a "documentation framework" that provides convenient indexing and automatic syntax highlighting, and can also integrate your documentation with your code (your documentation can be run as a test, and your class and function docstrings can become your reference documentation). Students will be given an undocumented sample Python package, and be lead through exercises that result, by the end of the tutorial, in their giving the package a full tutorial and reference manual. Deployment and theming will also be taught.
Besides a 15-minute introduction and 15 minutes for questions and discussion at the end, the tutorial will be organized in six 25-minute sessions which each involve a short lecture and then an interactive exercise that asks the students to apply what they have just learned. Here are the major topics covered by each of the six sessions:
- The reStructuredText markup language and its syntax; the standard doctools; and the two different conventions that Sphinx can support for laying projects out as directories and files.
- The Sphinx documentation build process on both Unix and Windows; how to arrange your project documentation in a way that will make sense to novice, experienced, and expert users alike; and how Sphinx supports connections between different pages of documentation.
- Running code examples in the documentation as doctests; the pros and cons of pulling docstrings from the code as API documentation (and how to do it if it proves necessary); and including non-doctest full code listings in the documentation.
- Referencing headings in the same document; cross-referencing between documents; making class and method names automatically link to their entry in the API documentation; and how to make code objects appear in the index.
- Theming with custom HTML and CSS, for students who happen to know web design; plugging in pre-made Sphinx themes; and how to integrate Sphinx into an entire web site for their product.
- Shipping documentation with your package on PyPI; installing it readthedocs.org; making sure that documentation gets included with a binary install; using a version control source browser to view documentation directly in their project trunk; and deploying Sphinx to a web site.
The Sphinx approach will be linked to other successful documentation systems in our computing heritage, most notably in the practices it shares in common with the Unix Documenter's Workbench (DWB) of the 1970s.
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High Performance Python I
by Ian Ozsvald
At EuroPython 2011 I ran a very hands-on tutorial for High Performance Python techniques. This updated tutorial will cover profiling, PyPy, Cython, numpy, NumExpr, ShedSkin, multiprocessing, ParallelPython and pyCUDA. Here's a 55 page PDF write-up of the EuroPython material: http://ianozsvald.com/2011/07/25...
At EuroPython 2011 I ran a very hands-on tutorial for High Performance Python techniques. This updated tutorial will cover:
- profiling with cProfile, run_snake and line_profiler
- PyPy
- Cython
- numpy with and without vectors
- NumExpr
- ShedSkin Py->C++ compiler
- multiprocessing for multi-core
- ParallelPython for multi-machine
- pyCUDA demos
I plan to expand the original material and to maybe also cover other tools like execnet and PyPy-numpy.
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Introduction to Game Development
by Katie Cunningham and Richard Jones
This tutorial will walk the attendees from some introductory game development theory (what makes a good game) and through development of a simple game (how to make a good game) with time left over for some experimentation and exploration of different types of games.
The tutorial will start with Katie Cunningham giving an introduction to video games, covering the basic components of a game, and some general game genres. Some basic tropes in modern games will be explored, as well as pitfalls to avoid in making a game for a today’s audience. Genres will be paired with inexpensive/free examples that can be explored by the tutorial attendees later.
The baton will then pass to Richard Jones who will walk through the practicalities of building a simple video game from scratch, starting with presenting one approach to structuring the game code to keep it sane. He will talk about what libraries are available and then focus on the facilities present in the library used in the tutorial.
We will then walk through the development of a simple game during which the attendees will code the game. Once the game is developed we will talk about potential further development that possibilities and use the remaining tutorial time to encourage and assist attendees in their efforts to do so.
The game developed will cover the key game-writing skills of controlling what appears on the screen (including animation), loading resources, handling user input and simulating the environment within the game.
Participants should be familiar with Python, and must have pygame installed. We will not have time to deal with installation and compatibility issues so participants must check their laptops can run pygame applications.
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Optimize Performance and Scalability with Parallelism and Concurrency
From how the operating system handles your requests through design principles on how to use concurrency and parallelism to optimize your program's performance and scalability. We will cover processes, threads, generators, coroutines, non-blocking IO, and the gevent library.
How processes, threads, coroutines, and non-blocking IO work from the operating system through code implementation and design principles to optimize Python programs. The difference between parallelism and concurrency and when to use each.
The premise is that to make an informed decision you need to know what is happening under the hood. Once you understand the low level functionality, you can make the correct decision in the design phase.
The emphasis is on practical application to solve real world problems.
Outline
- How the operating system handles traps and interrupts
- Scheduling
- Processes
- Threads
- The GIL
- Generators
- What is a coroutine?
- What is a Python coroutine?
- Blocking/Non-blocking I/O.
- Parallelism versus Concurrency
- How do these work with CPython, Pypy, and Stackless
- Greenlets and libevent (gevent)
- Design principles
- Example networked application
- Performance results
- What are other the other options?
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Plotting with matplotlib
by Mike Müller
When it comes to plotting with Python many people think about matplotlib. It is widely used and provides a simple interface for creating a wide variety of plots from very simple diagrams to sophisticated animations. This tutorial is a hands-on introduction that teaches the basics of matplotlib. Students will learn how to create publication-ready plots with just a few lines of Python.
Target Audience
This tutorial is for Python users who would like to create nice 2d plots with Python.
Audience Level
Students should have a working knowledge of Python. NumPy knowledge is helpful but not required.
Prerequisites
Please bring your laptop with the operating system of your choice (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). In addition to Python 2.6 or 2.7, we need: - a current versions of matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net) - IPython (http://ipython.org) and - NumPy (http://numpy.scipy.org).
Method
This is a hands-on course. Students are strongly encouraged to work along with the trainer at the interactive prompt. There will be exercises the students need to do on their own. Experience shows that this active involvement is essential for an effective learning.
Content
The library matplotlib provides many different types of diagrams from within Python with only few lines of code. Examples are used to exercise the use of this library. The tutorial provides an overview how to create plots with matplotlib. IPython in combination with pylab from matplotlib provides an interactive environment for fast testing of ideas. We will be using this for most of the tutorial.
With a simple plot we learn how to add axis labels, titles and a legend. The GUI offers zooming, panning, changing of plot sizes and other interactive ways to modify the plot. We will use Python to change properties of existing plots such as line colors, marker symbols, or line styles. There are several ways how to place text on plots. You will learn about the different coordinate systems relative to the plot, the canvas or the figure. Another topic are ticks, where to put them and how to format them to achieve publication-quality plots. The concepts of figures, subplots, and axes and how they relate to each other will be explained with examples.
matplotlib offers many different types of plots. The tutorial introduces several of them with an example. A more advanced topic will be creating your own plot types. We will build a stacked plot type. Finally, we will create a small animation to explore the possibilities to visualize changes.
Outline
- Introduction (5 min)
- IPython (5 min)
- pylab (5 min)
- Simple plots (20 min)
- Properties (15 min)
- Text (20 min)
- Ticks (25 min)
- Figures, subplots, and axes (25 min)
- Other types of plots (10 min)
- The class library (15 min)
- Creating New Plot Types (20 min)
- Animations (15 min)
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Python Epiphanies
by Stuart Williams
This tutorial is for software developers who've been using Python with success for a while but are looking for a deeper understanding of the language. It demystifies a number of language features that are often misunderstood.
In many ways Python is very similar to other programming languages. However, in a few sometimes subtle ways it is quite different, and many software developers new to Python, after their initial successes, hit a plateau and can't figure out how to get past it. Others don't hit or perceive a plateau, but still find some of Python's features a little mysterious. This tutorial will help deconstruct your incorrect assumptions about Python and pull away the mists of confusion.
If in your use of Python you sometimes feel like an outsider, like you're missing the inside jokes, or like you have most of the puzzle pieces but they don't quite fit together yet, this may be a good tutorial for you.
After completing this tutorial you'll have a deeper understanding of many Python features. Here are some of the topics we'll cover:
- How namespaces really work, after which you'll understand:
- most of the differences between variables in other languages and Python, including
- why Python has neither pass-by-value nor pass-by-reference function call semantics, or why sometimes variables passed to a function can be changed by it, and sometimes they cannot.
- Iterables, iterators, and the iterator protocol, including how to add it to a class
- How generators can make your code easier to read and understand
- Creating classes without a class statement in order to better understand how they work
- Bound versus unbound methods and interesting uses of the former
- How and why you might want to create or use a partial function
- Other use-cases of functions as first-class citizens
- Unpacking and packing arguments with * and ** on function call and definition
Attendee Requirements
Bring a laptop computer with a recent version of Python 2.7 or Python 3 installed.
Prerequisites
Intermediate ability in Python and little or no fear of iterators, generators, classes, methods, and how to call a function that's stored in a data structure.
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Social Network Analysis with Python
Social Network data permeates our world -- yet we often don't know what to do with it. In this tutorial, I will introduce both theory and practice of Social Network Analysis -- gathering, analyzing and visualizing data using Python and other open-source tools. I will walk the attendees through an entire project, from gathering and cleaning data to presenting results.
SNA techniques are derived from sociological and social-psychological theories and take into account the whole network (or, in case of very large networks such as Twitter -- a large segment of the network). Thus, we may arrive at results that may seem counter-intuitive -- e.g. that Justin Bieber (7.5 mil. followers) and Lady Gaga (7.2 mil. followers) have relatively little actual influence despite their celebrity status -- while a middle-of-the-road blogger with 30K followers is able to generate tweets that "go viral" and result in millions of impressions.
In this tutorial, we will conduct social network analysis of a real dataset, from gathering and cleaning data to analysis and visualization of results. We will use Python and a set of open-source libraries, including NetworkX, NumPy and Matplotlib.
Outline:
- Introduction. Why should we do this? What is the data like? Why is this different from other techniques? What can we learn?
- Centralities: Degree, closeness, betweenness, PageRank, Klout Score
- Beyond Klout Score: Finding communities of interest, finding clusters in networks
- Information diffusion in networks -- how do things go viral?
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DevOps for Python: Doing More With Less
The world of infrastructure as code is becoming far more pervasive and many Python developers are trying to find a way to get started. This class will get you up and running with Chef and Fabric to manage your systems be they in the cloud or under your desk.
Students must have a laptop with the Chef gem and git installed. Install instructions will sent out before the class.
Agenda
- Devops and Chef philosophy
- Chef basics
- Basic resources
- Data bags
- Environments
- Intro to Ruby for Chef
- Fabric
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High Performance Python II
In this tutorial, I will cover how to write very fast Python code for data analysis. I will briefly introduce NumPy and illustrate how fast code for Python is written in SciPy using tools like Fwrap / F2py and Cython. I will also describe interesting new approaches to creating fast code that is leading changes to NumPy on a fundamental level.
In this tutorial, I will cover how to write very fast Python code for data analysis including making use of NumPy and using GPUs. I will largely focus on writing extensions to Python using hand-wrapping and Cython but will touch also on using tools like weave, Instant, ShedSkin and compare them to PyPy. I will also spend the last part of the tutorial on using GPUs with Python and discuss the performance trade-offs of the technology. This will be a high-level overview of the space with deep dives in Cython and GPUs
Outline:
- Brief Introduction to NumPy, SciPy and array-oriented computing with Python including exercises (1 hour)
- Introduction to hand-wrapping and extending Python (1 hour)
- Detailed description of Cython and how to use it to connect to machine-compiled code (1 hour)
- Detailed description of GPUs and how to use them best with NumPy (45 minutes)
- Summary and overview of using Python to write super fast code (15 minutes)
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Introduction to Interactive Predictive Analytics in Python with scikit-learn
The goal of this tutorial is to give the attendee a first experience of machine learning tools applied to practical software engineering tasks such as language detection of tweets, topic classification of web pages, sentiment analysis of customer products reviews and facial recognition in pictures from the web or from your own webcam.
The demand for software engineers with Data Analytics and Machine Learning skills is rapidly growing and Python / Numpy is one of the best environments for quickly prototyping scalable data-centric applications or interactively exploring your data especially thanks to tools such as IPython and Matplotlib.
scikit-learn is a very active open source project that implements a variety of state-of-the art machine learning algorithms. The goal of this project and tutorial is to take the algorithms out of the academic papers and make them work on a selection of real world tasks to unleash the value of your data.
We will focus on providing hints to perform the right data preprocessing steps and on how to select algorithms and parameters suitable for the task at hand. We will also introduce tools and methodologies to measure the performance of the trained models as objectively as possible.
Friday 9th March 2012
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Paul Graham, Y Combinator
by Paul Graham
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A Noob Speaks to Noobs: Your First Site in the Cloud
A developer talks about her lessons learned with setting up her first server, and offers advice to others about to tread that path.
My background (how did I get this far without mucking with servers?)
Lesson one: The first step is not to install the OS yourself
Get a Rackspace account!
Rough cost analysis
Lesson two: Use Ubuntu
The CentOS saga
Why Ubuntu?
Lesson three: Automate everything
What you need to know about fabric
Lesson four: Don't mess with production
The cost of a new slice
The cost of ruining everything forever
The magic of cloning
Lesson five: Your next steps
Security!
Virtualenv -
Graph Processing in Python
by Van Lindberg
Graphs are everywhere - from your distributed source code control to Twitter analytics. This session presents a set of three problems and shows how they can be decomposed into operations on graphs, and then demonstrates solutions using the various graph libraries available for (or accessible to) Python.
Graphs are a fundamental computer science datatype, and graphs show up in all sorts of models in all sorts of places. So when you have a graph, what can you do with it? Particularly if it is really big?
Thirty minutes isn't a lot of time to discuss graph processing as a topic, so there won't be a lot of discussion relative to graph theory generally or the terminology of graphs. Instead, this is inspired by Raymond Hettinger's "mastering team play" - a series of exercises showing the lowering of a problem into a graph representation, followed by a demonstration of how the problem can be solved through graph processing. There will also be a little bit of compare-and-contrast between the available graph libraries to show differences. Each problem will be given 8-10 minutes.
Problem 1: Python's (legal) history
Python has developed over time under a number of organizations - each with their own license. What portions of Python's codebase are under each license?The CVS/SVN/HG trees as graphs modeling change in time
Identifying and labeling node types
Graphing and reporting on results
Problem 2: Development Cliques
Linux is famously developed with "lieutenants" in charge of different subsystems of the kernel. Python doesn't have lieutenants... or does it? Put another way, if you have a patch, who should you submit it to?Mailing list connections as a graph
Analysis of connections, cliques, and centrality
Graphing and reporting on results
Problem 3: Let's get social
Your employer has decided that its website should be turned into a social network - you know, because there aren't enough of those.Bootstrapping a graph by looking at pairwise analysis of products
How to suggest who people "might know"? -
Introduction to Metaclasses
Python's metaclasses grant the Python OOP ecosystem all the power of more complex object inheritance systems in other languages, while retaining for most uses the simplicity of the straightforward class structures most developers learn when being introduced to object-oriented programming. This talk is an explanation of metaclasses: first, what they are, and second, how to use them.
- Metaclasses
- Introduction (2.5m)
- Python's metaclasses grant the Python OOP ecosystem all the power of more complex object inheritance systems in other languages, while retaining the simplicity of the straightforward class structure that traditional C++ and Java programmers learned, and is taught in programming courses.
- Classes are Objects, Too! (5m)
- Classes are first-class objects in Python, like functions/methods
- Classes, like other objects, can be assigned to variables and passed as arguments
- ...and this ability is one of the tricks in the reusable code toolbox
- Concept: Metaclasses generate classes. (5m)
- The hierarchy starts with "type"
- Classes are themselves instances of their metaclasses
- By extension, classes provide code that runs when instances are created, while metaclasses provide code that runs when classes are created.
- Remember the "analogies" section on standardized tests in the United States (and many other countries)?
- Babylon 5 : J. Michael Strazynski :: Star Trek : ___
- Instances : Classes :: Classes : Metaclasses
- Think about a self-enclosed machine that creates, say, t-shirts. The machine is the class; the individual shirts are the instances. The guy who builds the t-shirt machines is the metaclass.
- Concrete Code Examples (10m)
- will cover 3.0 and 2.7
- (stub: I haven't decided what my example will be yet)
- Is metaclassing wise? (2.5m)
- There's nothing inherently wrong or bad about it. Furthermore, sometimes it's by far the best way to solve a problem.
- Beware, though: Some people find metaclassing confusing.
- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." (Brian Kernighan)
- Questions (5m)
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PBS KIDS: Building a login system for kids and teens in Python
by Edgar Roman
Our challenge was to create a login system for little people who might barely read, maybe no email, perhaps no home computer. And we had to watch out for privacy laws - especially tough for minors. But these kids want to play games, write stories, and create online avatars to share and compete against their buddies. Listen to how we developed the PBS KIDS login and moderation system in Django.
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Stop Mocking, Start Testing
by Augie Fackler and Nathaniel Manista
Project Hosting at Google Code is a large, well-established system written mostly in Python. We'll share our battle-born convictions about creating tests for test-unfriendly code and the larger topic of testing.
When launched, Project Hosting’s testing consisted of the stock Subversion test suite and a handful of ad hoc smoke test scripts that required starting the entire system and manually inspecting the test’s output.
Over six years of codebase evolution, tests have been added with varying degrees of coverage and maintainability. Early system design decisions made adding tests difficult: the first tests added to the system used mock objects unwisely and large numbers of mock objects made refactoring costly in time and effort.
Frustration with the difficulty of enhancing the service led us to reevaluate our testing practice and led to the discovery of better ways to test applications of this complexity. We will share our experiences with testing and discuss designing for maintainability and testability and appropriate use of testing tools such as frameworks and mocks.
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Extracting musical information from sound
Music Information Retrieval technology has gotten good enough that you extract musical metadata from your sound files with some degree of accuracy. Find out how to use Python (along with third-party APIs) to determine everything from the key/tempo of a song to the pitch/timbre of individual notes. Then we'll do some amusing analysis of popular tunes.
Music Information Retrieval technology has gotten good enough that you extract musical metadata from your sound files with some degree of accuracy. Find out how to use Python (along with third-party APIs) to determine everything from the key/tempo of a song to the pitch/timbre of individual notes. Then we'll do some amusing analysis of popular tunes.
Getting basic data about sounds.
Visualizing waveforms.
Parsing musical information at the level of song.
Detecting individual notes ("segments").
What fun can we have? -
How to make your websites more accessible
by Robbie Clemons
Is your website accessible? Have you tested it? What does it even mean for a website to be accessible? In this talk we'll show some of the most common problems disabled users have and demonstrate how to fix them. I'll also introduce you to some tools that are written in Python to help you determine how accessible your site is.
There are several different types of Assistive Technology designed to help disabled users access the web. However a lot of websites don't work well with some Assistive Technologies and in this talk we'll show how to uncover the accessibility problems in a website and fix them. I'll provide a demonstration by using some common Assistive Technology on a few different example websites built with Python web frameworks that are problematic and then I'll show the modifications necessary to make each website accessible.
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Scalability at YouTube
by Shannon -jj Behrens and Mike Solomon
This talk covers scalability at YouTube. It's given by one of the original engineers at YouTube, Mike Solomon. It's a rare glimpse into the heart of YouTube which is one of the largest websites in the world, and one of the few extremely large websites to be written in Python.
AbstractEvery day, people watch an average of 3 billion videos on YouTube. Every minute, people upload an average of 48 hours of video to YouTube. YouTube operates at a scale that few other websites will ever see, and it's written mostly in Python.
Mike Solomon is one of the original engineers at YouTube. In this informal, high-level talk, he'll give an overview of the lessons he's learned as he's brought YouTube to scale. He'll also point out ways in which his philosophy on scaling, testing, and writing Python fly in the face of accepted wisdom. Last of all, we'll also be giving a very short introduction to YouTube APIs and how you can integrate your application with YouTube.
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