The Thinkful team recently attended PyGotham, the annual NYC convention for all things Python!
Organized and run by the NYC Python meetup group, the event attracted over 300 pythonistas and had 65 speakers including our “PatrĂłn” of Engineering SaĂşl DĂez-Guerra. SaĂşl’s talk on “Speed Without Drag” highlighted ways to make your Python code run faster.
We’ve highlighted some of the awesome speakers who presented specifically on Python education:
Elliott Hauser - @hauspoor - Finding Your Teaching Stack
Python enthusiast and teacher Elliott Hauser explained the value of building out a solid “teaching stack” when helping student learn to code. One of the largest barriers for teaching programming is getting the student’s coding environment set up and being able to easily share your code. For this reason it is important to choose the right tools that will help you to easily get the student up and ready to code. For example, his company Trinket.io let’s you see and modifiy Python code directly in the browser giving begginers at ideal coding enviorment to get started! Check out his recommended “Elements of the Teaching stack” from his presentation.
Eric Matzner @Matznerd - How I taught my 10 year Old Brother to Code
Eric spoke passionately about the need for teaching programming to kids. He even suggests that programming languages should be taught in place of foreign languages at schools. He also gave insight on how to give kids the “programming bug” so that they can go from technology user to creator. The original reddit post, on teaching his 10 year old brother to code, inspired his presentation and has a number of entertaining ideas on how to learn to code!
Jarret Petrillo - @JarretPetrillo - Helping Python Play Chess
Many Python novices incorrectly assume that their lack of experience means that they can’t make any meaningful contributions to the Python community. Jarret spoke about his experience with Pystockfish, a small package he wrote which allows Python programs to easily work with the stockfish chess engine. With very little work anyone can connect an already powerful library to python and make a meaningful contribution to the community! Just check out the source of pystockfish to see how it's done and think about a program you’d like to see a library for in Python.
Below is a list of speakers with their twitter handles and links to their presentation slides! We will update if you tweet @Thinkful.
Aaron Hall - @aaronchall
Adrian Heilbut - @Adrian_H
Alfred Lee - @Alphrabet - What Problem Are You Trying to Solve, Anyway?
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This past week, the Flatiron School had their #ScienceFAIR for their Ruby, iOS, and Web fellowship cohorts. The 80 students presented some amazing capstone projects to potential employers and we’ve highlighted a few (including a past Thinkful student!).
Have you ever been frustrated with the NYC Subway system? Surprisingly, you aren’t alone! Christina Cannito, Samer Khaleel, Yaritza Rodriguez, and Yonatan Miller used the API for the New York MTA and created an amazing web app that allows you to set automatically text alerts when a specific subway line is having delays or isn’t running.
Users are able to receive the status of their trains via text message. This allows the user to give themselves the appropriate amount of time to get to their destination. nycsubwayalerts.herokuapp.com/
- Sends text messages to the user with the train status using Twilio.
- Scrapes the MTA’s API using NokoGiri to get the train’s status.
- Clean and an aesthetically appealing interface using Bootstrap, HTML and CSS.
2. Twitter Swear Jar (swearjar.me)
A much needed web app for the world of twitter, this Twitter Swear Jar is a great way to raise funds and moderate your social media language. You can choose any word or phrase so that each time you use it on twitter you will automatically be charged a fine via venmo! This awesome web app was created by Amy Johnson, Jacob Barrieault, and Mitch Boyer.
Twitter Swear Jar - Rails app allows groups to designate “taboo” words, auto-charges members when they tweet taboos
- Integrated Twitter and Venmo APIs to obtain and scan user’s Tweets and automatically deduct payments of one dollar when appropriate
- Used OAuth to log users in through Twitter and authorize payments through Venmo
- Built using an encryption gem and internal safety checks to protect sensitive data and prevent erroneous charges
- Employed jQuery on the front-end for responsiveness
3. Modern Mind (modernmind.herokuapp.com)
A past Thinkful student Julia Taitz along with Luke Demarest and Spencer Tang created a very interesting collaborative art web app. If you are familiar with Exquisite Corpse, this is the online version. One artist will draw a section and then let another artist collaborate by adding on. The trick is that they only see the very edge of the previously drawing leading to some very interesting creations. This web app version let’s you collaborate with anyone anywhere are share your masterpieces with other users.
Modern Mind - Rails interpretation of “Exquisite Corpse”, the surrealist drawing game
- Combined Processing.js with Rails to display interactive drawing canvases
- Used JavaScript, jQuery, Ajax, and HTML for canvas visualizations
- Incorporated the OmniAuth gem to allow users to securely login via their Facebook account
