KC User Group Tour, Part 3: Pythonistas

• Take 10 minutes and read: http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/
• Try it out, right now, in your browser: http://shell.appspot.com/
• The main site: http://python.org/
• History of Python: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python
• Bill Venner’s thoughtful interview of Guido: http://www.artima.com/intv/guido.html
• Django (it’s from around these parts) is one of the more notable Python-based projects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)
• PyCon (annual community gathering): https://us.pycon.org/2012/
  • Could PyCon happen around these parts?

• Started at 10am on Saturday, in Corporate Woods, Overland Park
• Sharp building, super-easy parking on the weekend
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• All the basics – coffee, soda, donuts, bathrooms, wifi, tables, chairs, plugins – and more, the offices were nice
• The organizers help compose the rooms with attendees of aligned expectations/capabilities
  • This room I called the “guru room.”  I’m not worthy yet, so I took a blurry picture and then bravely ran away.
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  • This is where I was – a mix of mentoring experts (not me) and kids with training wheels (me)
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    • I’ll bring a helmet to the next user group – safety first.
• One of the organizers, Pythonista Juan Gomez, helped us newbies feel welcome
  • He explained why new developers could feel confident in investing time in Python as their first programming language
    • It has a growing community
    • It supports multiple paradigms –  OOP, imperative, and some functional
  • He helped me understand some of the Python culture and history
  • Juan felt that the KC User Group culture is great – but he thinks that there is still a hidden wealth of technical talent that isn’t connected to the local community
• A KC User Group Tour Success Story – I overheard Pythonista Mark talking about the lack of Perl community in KC. He was happy to hear about my recent visit to the Mongers. (True story, for real.) He hopes to attend their meeting soon.
• Aside from the general interest in KC User Groups, I did have a specific interest in learning a little more Python – I want Sikuli in my tool box.
  • It lets me script with screenshots
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  • It has a Python (Jython) based scripting engine

Update – Q&A with Juan Gomez:

So far the community has been awesome and the response overwhelming. When the group started, we would’ve been happy with 5 or 6 people showing up for our meetings, but we’ve been fortunate enough to see 20 or more attendees on almost every monthly meeting, not only from the metro area but from nearby cities in both Missouri and Kansas (this weekend we had two Pythonistas visiting from  Abilene, KS). We’ve also recently passed the 100 members mark on meetup.com, all in less than a year!

I can write pages and pages about all the advantages of the language and why big companies like Google or Amazon use it, but for me, the main reason to learn Python is that is fun to use and it helps you rekindle your passion for programming, bringing back joy to your daily work.

Blue … yellow (Movie reference and also the colors of the Python logo 😉

Thanks Juan!

Next Up: KC Rubyists, and their next meeting is on Tuesday, February 21st. Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog to receive notifications of the future happenings in this series.

— Luke Patterson, [email protected]

Other Stops On The KC User Group Tour

Part 1: Perl Mongers

Part 2: Atlassian User Group

Part 3: Pythonistas

Part 4: Rubyists

Part 5: NodeLabs, by NodeKC (a guest post located on the Joyent blog site)