I have been part of the PythonPune organizing team since May 2019. Organizing and attending PythonPune meetups always excite me because I get to learn something new and meet new people. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, we moved meetups to virtual events since March'20, keeping the same level of excitement. The PythonPune team always prefers Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) for everything. We use the Jitsi Meet platform for speakers and hosts, and live stream it on YouTube channel to reach our audience. Sometimes when streaming from Jitsi Meet is not possible, then we take help of OBS Studio for live streaming.
October 2020 meetup
Planning for every meetup starts a month before, that includes selecting talks, announcing events, notifying people in advance and more. Bhavin kickstarted October meetup with demonstration of the git-cu tool from community newsletter. Git-cu is an interesting tool that keeps local Git repositories organized by cloning them into a directory structure based on their URL.
The first talk of October'20 meetup was “What’s new in Python 3.9” and it was delivered by Amol Kahat. He shed light on new features in Python 3.9. The talk began with an installation of Python 3.9 on the system. He described two ways of installation that are, by cloning CPython source and by downloading the tarball from python.org site. He also demonstrated his Python 3.9 environment. I learnt new remove prefix and remove suffix methods of string, new union operator added to the Python dictionary, decorate function with dictionary pairs. Python 3.9 supports the IANA time zone database in the standard library. There were questions about new union operator and adoption of Python3.9 by web frameworks.
The next talk was by me on “Understanding Python’s super() function”. The talk was pretty simple but as I explored super() in-depth, I wanted to explain super() in detail and how it works for multiple inheritances. I explained the proxy object returned by super(), Method Resolution Order (MRO) and benefits of super(). Before the talk ends, I gave practical advice on usage of super(), for example, the caller and callee need to have a matching argument signature etc.
November 2020 meetup
The meetup began with one interesting tool from the November month’s newsletter by Chandan. He presented us with a pip-chill package that is a nice way of generating requirements files for any Python project with a minimum number of dependency packages as compared to the “pip freeze”.
Another talk of the November meetup was second in the series of design patterns by A.P. Rajshekhar. He explained structural design patterns taking examples of Facade and Proxy patterns. Facade pattern was well understood when taken as an example of a user profile that wraps the complicated subsystem and provides a simpler interface for clients. He also gave a tour of protective proxy design patterns with its intent, common usage and implementation. That was indeed an insightful talk. A.P. Rajshekhar is planning to give the next talk about behaviour patterns in a future meetup.
Chit-chat session
Since we moved to virtual meetup, we were missing the discussions with other fellow PythonPune members. That’s why we came up with the idea of a hangout call. This room is open to all chit-chat where everyone joins the Jitsi Meet call after talks are done. This is an opportunity for our audience to talk with the speakers and PythonPune team directly.
PythonPune group has completed 6 years of continuous meetups this December and still counting many more years ahead. To be part of this journey, you can visit pythonpune.in and join the group.