Amit Kumar : Life Is Learning!

PyData London 39th Meetup 🐍


Last week I got the opportunity to attend and speak at PyData London’s 39th Meetup at AHL’s office. Our Backend lead at work Prashant is a co-organiser of the meetup. One of the speakers turned away few days before the meetup, then Prashant asked me if I could deliver a talk. I realised that I could deliver the talk I proposed at PyData Delhi which unfortunately didn’t got accepted, so I said yes to it and moreover I love attending and speaking at meetups as it’s an awesome way to share something and also helps in improving your public speaking skills.

I thought it would be like just another python meetup, then I realised that this meetup gets a huge number of RSVP’s than it can accomodate, hence the organisers do a lottery for finding whose rsvp request will be accepted. This lottery is done via a Python script, which uses Meetup.com’s API to randomly select participants. Prashant is the guy responsible for running the script few days before the meetup.

I turned up at the meetup at around 6:30 with Prashant and Federico (my colleague), We got in at around 6:40 PM, thanks to AHL for sponsoring pizzas and drinks. It was a house full of around 200 people. It seemed like a mini python conference. I was supposed to speak first at 7 but had to shift the talk to second slot due to missing usb-c connector. Meanwhile Dhruv Ghulati delivered a talk on Automated fact checking - technical approaches and challenges.

Then we had a short break and fortunately I got the connector for my laptop. My talk was based on an introduction to building data pipelines with Luigi. It was a result of my experiences working with the Image quality prediction pipeline at Zomato. I was introduced to luigi by Shubham Chaudhary in one of our Team Learning sessions at Zomato. The content for the talk can be found here:

Data Pipelining with luigi @ PyData London Meetup

After the talks we had some quick lightning talks by Parul Sethi on Visualizing Topic Models with gensim and another talk by Chenfu Wang on pyexcel.

After the talks we went to a bar nearby for socialising and drinks. I met a lot of people including Lev (developer of gensim) and Parul who came to UK for PyCon UK and got the chance to sneak into the meetup. It was an amazing evening spent with people from different domains. I highly recommend this meetup who has an appetite for Data Science. I am looking forward to the next meetup.