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12 April 2015

Links from PyCon 2015

Instead of writing a conference overview, here's an assorted list of links for things I saw, heard of, or wondered about while attending talks and meeting new people at PyCon this year. These are in no particular order and I'm missing a bunch I forgot.

  • "SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers."
  • "ROS [Robot Operating system] is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management."
  • "GeoJSON is a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures."
  • "GeoPandas is an open source project to make working with geospatial data in python easier. GeoPandas extends the datatypes used by pandas to allow spatial operations on geometric types."
  • "N-grams to the rescue! A collection of unigrams (what bag of words is) cannot capture phrases and multi-word expressions, effectively disregarding any word order dependence. Additionally, the bag of words model doesn’t account for potential misspellings or word derivations."
  • "A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning: This article summarizes twelve key lessons that machine learning researchers and practitioners have learned. These include pitfalls to avoid, important issues to focus on, and answers to common questions."
  • "Compare randomized search and grid search for optimizing hyperparameters of a random forest. All parameters that influence the learning are searched simultaneously (except for the number of estimators, which poses a time / quality tradeoff)."
  • SainSmart 4-Axis Control Palletizing Robot Arm Model For Arduino UNO MEGA250
  • Nanopore sequencing of DNA
  • Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms
  • "diff-cover: Automatically find diff lines that need test coverage. Also finds diff lines that have violations (according to tools such as pep8, pyflakes, flake8, or pylint). This is used as a code quality metric during code reviews."
  • "FuzzyWuzzy: Fuzzy string matching like a boss."
  • "Glue is a Python library to explore relationships within and among related datasets."
  • "Tabula: If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful it is — there's no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using a simple, easy-to-use interface."
  • "Blaze expressions: Blaze abstracts tabular computation, providing uniform access to a variety of database technologies"
  • "AppVeyor: Continuous Delivery service for Windows" (aka: Travis CI for Windows)
  • "Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7: This package contains the compiler and set of system headers necessary for producing binary wheels for Python 2.7 packages."
  • "Ghost Inspector lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks."
  • "Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers"
  • "The bytearray class is a mutable sequence of integers in the range 0 <= x < 256. It has most of the usual methods of mutable sequences, described in Mutable Sequence Types, as well as most methods that the bytes type has."
  • "git webdiff: Two-column web-based git difftool"
  • "Bug: use HTTPS by default for uploading packages to pypi"

If you ever wonder why people go to conferences, this is why. You get exposure to a wide range of topics in a very short period of time, plus you get to meet people who are excited about everything and inspire you to learn more.
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