We are here today with solomn hearts, dear friends. As many of you may know, our previous president Yannick “What these glasses?!” Gingras will be leaving Montréal for the warmer pastures of San Francisco to work for none other than the one… Facebook.

It is indeed a great loss for Montréal Python, our city itself and all of us who call Yannick a friend. It’s also a pretty severe loss for all the brew-pubs in Montréal Québec Canada. And yet, it is an exceptionally exciting move for Yannick; he has the opportunity to bring Python to something that millions of people use every day.

And so, with Yannick leaving and the winter just starting, what better time to celebrate – a sort of melancholy celebration – but a celebration nonetheless. The plan:

Wednesday, November 16th from 17h to “19h” at our staple, Benelux.

Join your fellow Pythonistas to wish Yannick a fantastic adventure and solidify his belief that Montréal Python is an amazing usergroup capable of amazing things.
See you there !

Python is a powerful agile language that surprises us by its suppleness and the ease with which we can use it to solve complex problems in just a few lines of code.

This month, we are exploring unexpected and unconventional uses of Python across many domains. We are inviting you all to Inadvertent Indentation, Monday Movember 21st at UQAM, in room SH-R810 of the Sherbrooke Pavillion.

The even is free and even thought we will not serve a four course meal, snacks will be provided. Rumor has it that there could also be some free beer.

Here is our schedule for the night:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: First salvo
• 19h10: Pause
• 19h25: Second salvo
• 20h30: Discussions and refreshments at Benelux

Our ingenious presenters will be:

Flash Presentations

• Dominic Savoie, “Functional Python Programming with Moka”
• Geoff Salmon, “Python in a Stereo – Handling Music and its metadata in a plug computer”

Presentation

• Angelique Mannella and Antoine Reversat, “Building a mobile application using pyside on Meego”
• Alastair Porter, “Audio fingerprinting and metadata correction with Python”
• Andrew Hankinson, “Optical Music Recognition”
• Marc Tardif, “The Design and Implementation of a Launchpad microservice”
• Jean-Lou Dupont, “Message Switch” pour une architecture “Design by Actor”

Finally, a big thanks to our generous Sponsors:

• Ludia
• iWeb
• Benelux
• UQAM
• Le Site
• Savoir-Faire Linux

We invite you to participate to the hackathon with Montréal-Python, even if you have not already registered or not.

We are hosting a preliminary meeting next Monday, the 14th of November, at L’Escalier near metro Berri-Uqam (http://g.co/maps/t792h), from 7pm to 9pm.

Will will organise teams and find common subjects everyone wants to work on. A few interesting ideas have already been proposed for Montréal-Ouvert here: https://mtlouvert.uservoice.com/forums/137103-hackathon-donn-es-ouvertes-montr-al-19-novembre

Also, if you plan on going to the hackathon, please make sure you have registered yourself with Montreal-Ouvert on eventbright here: http://montrealouvert.eventbrite.com/

See you guys on Monday,

Montréal-Python and UQAM’s Association générale des étudiants et étudiantes en informatique  (AGEEI, the student union of CS students) are proud to announce their very first French open attendance Python workshop.

You do not need to know any Python since this is going to be an Introduction to Python session.

Our MC for the evening is going to be Davin Baragiotta, vice-president of Montréal-Python and coordonator of information systems at Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF).

The event is going to feature two parts:

• The first part is going to bring us up to speed with the syntax, core data types, main modules of the standard library, and the intractive shell.
• In the second part Davin will dive deep with a practical application of Python: building a Jabber bot.

The workshop is going to take place in room SH-R810 of the Shebrooke building of UQAM on November 17 from 6h30 PM to 9h PM.

AGEEI will provide pizza and refreshments.

Thank you to our sponsors Ludia and Savoir-faire Linux to help us creating this event!

All you have to bring is your curious brain, your sense of humour, and your laptop computer.

If you have some spare time, you can also get your system ready by installing Python 2.7 from the following site: http://www.python.org/download/

Ubuntu users are lucky here because all what they have to do is: sudo apt-get install python (if it’s not installed already).

If  you don’t have time to do the setup of if get lost,  DON’T PANIC.  We’ll be there starting at 5h30 PM, and we’ll help you get everything up and running.

To register, you simply have to sign up for free on the guestlist: http://guestli.st/76584

We live in Montréal and we hack Python code; this is who we are. Right now, it just got event more exciting to be a hacker in this city. We hack code, but when our code interacts with cool data, the dance is a lot spicier. On Wednesday, the city of Montréal made us proud by releasing a lot of it’s data under a very permissive license. This is a first in the province of Québec.

Montréal-Ouvert has already been planing on hacking on Saturday November 19th.
Now that it has become exciting with real data, we want to make sure that there’s going to be a lot of Python code written there.

We don’t know yet where the hackothon will take place, but we trust that it’s going to be near downtown, somewhere within walking distance from a metro station. We will be there, and if you like to write Python code and plan on being there, write you name in the comments below; we’re going to assemble a corrosive Python strike team.

Here’s some ideas for cool projects we could undertake during this one day event:

• A site where people could suggest and vote on what dataset the city should release next. Think of something like Reddit or Ubuntu BrainStorm where someone could say “hey, I’d love to make a Patiner-Montreal clone for ski” or “let’s make homebrewing more fun by indexing the water hardness data by burough.”
• A cross-correlation of the datasets already published; can we use the demographics data to visualize how many firemen there are per resident in all of our burrows? How about policemen per resident? What if we bring an extra dimension, like average revenue per burough?
• An aggregator of existing and upcoming applications: a site where it’s easy to see what everyone is doing with the open data of Montréal and with all sorts of metadata like the GitHub repo and the contribution process. Voting on the best applications would make it event more fun.
• A flexible and intuitive calendar of the festivals and cultural events that makes is easy to browse by date, location and genre.
• An integration of all this new smoking hot data with Open Street Maps. Mapify all the things!

So, we’re going to be there. Who else is in?

Last week, Mathieu Perreault and Derek Ruths gave the second McGill Python Workshop. With around 40 attendees, the event was definitely a success and you should expect another workshop soon.

Derek lets us know:

We showcased a number of libraries that ship with Python including support for working with SQLite databases, pickling objects, reading and writing CSV files, building well-formed command-line tools, and constructing applications with a full graphical user interface!

That’s a nice series of events to keep an eye on.

Next week #MTLStartupTalent will be held on monday and aims to connect companies that are hiring with talent looking for employment. Montreal-Python invite you to assist and participate and to demonstrate how dynamic and energetic are the Pythonistas of Montreal-Python.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Access to great job opportunities at great companies
• A chance to converse with an employee or founder and start to build a relationship
• A casual (yet serious) environment to network with others in your field of interest

If you are interested, don’t forget to register your place at

http://mtlstartuptalent.eventbrite.com/

See you on Thursday !

Hi all,

Montréal-Python is organizing a third meeting with our Pythonistas
to discuss about their talk proposals for PyCon 2012.

Wednesday 2011-10-05, 7:00 PM
at Bénélux [1]

As reminded by Brian Curtin 2 days ago on this list [2], proposals for
PyCon are due for 2011-10-12.

We heard great ideas at the Bénélux last monday night.
Other Pythonistas are willing to help you get on stage at Santa Clara.
Send your abstract [3] (or not) somewhere like Sunday evening and
show up (or not) Wednesday at Bénélux.

We’re all gonna make it happen!
See you there!

[1] http://www.brasseriebenelux.com/
[2] see email with subject : PyCon 2012 Proposals Due October 12
[3] send it to : team@lists.montrealpython.org