Melissa Ferrari

Melissa Ferrari

Personal website.

NYC PyLadies November Study Group

5 minute read

On November 19th 2018, I co-hosted my first NYC PyLadies event alongside Antonia Blair, which was also the first of a monthly Ladies Study Group series. The event, hosted by Equinox, was a great success with 20 attendees, many attending their first PyLadies event ever!

Study Group

“I love that overall, Pyladies provides a safe and welcoming environment for women of such diverse backgrounds!” Felice Ho

What is the purpose of the study group?

It is a regular gathering for PyLadies of all levels to work on solo projects or in collaboration with one another. It is a welcoming space where any Python related question is fair game, beginner or advanced, or in-between. The overarching goal is to foster a community where attendees can share coding resources, set realistic goals, and encourage each other.

How does this series differ from past NYC PyLadies study groups?

PyLadies has hosted study group events in the past and they have been a great success because the community is made up of individuals who are eager to collaborate and support one another. Attendee feedback from the past events has suggested that the lack of structure essential for any study group event made it difficult for members who are just starting out and/or those looking for new collaboration opportunities. Futhermore, if study groups aren’t offered regularly, it is difficult to establish continuity and foster growth.

With this study group series we hope to provide the right balance between structured networking and free-form coding time. We take feedback seriously and are open to adapting the structure of the evening to the needs and wants of the community.

A summary of the evening.

SHOW AND TELL

We hope to encourage attendees to share something that interests them: a Python coding tip, interesting article, short tutorial, etc. Whether a beginner or expert we hope that everyone feels comfortable contributing. Being the first event of the series, Antonia and I prepared things to share in hopes to demonstrate the broadness of what attendees are encouraged to share.

  • Open source discussion, led by me, Melissa Ferrari:
    I shared my first accepted pull request to an open source project, Project Jupyter. This pull request was the product of a full day event I attended that was hosted by the NumFOCUS Diversity & Inclusion in Scientific Computing(DISC) Program and Two Sigma.

    I spent the morning of the event familiarizing myself with the current Issues in the JupyterLab project and deciding which issues would be realistic to tackle in one day, particularly those labeled good first issue. The issue I chose, required some understanding of the Typescript language syntax.

    By the end of the day I had submitted my first pull request. I only changed two lines in the codebase but contributing to Jupyter, a tool I had been using for 5+ years, felt satisfying.

    JupyterLab-PR

    Making my first contribution to a large open source project was a learning experience; it took a long time and was more difficult than I had expected. I was appreciative to attend this particular event because experienced Project Jupyter contributors were available for guidance throughout the day. Now that I have some experience, I hope to tackle more challenging issues within the project.

    We had a fruitful discussion about contributing to open source at the study group and here were some takeaways from that conversation:

    • Some PyLadies contribute to open source to understand practical code design within larger projects.
    • Contributing to open source documentation is an important and often overlooked task. We all use softwarkee documentation and well written documentation can make all the difference when using an open source library.

  • Customize your command prompt, led by Antonia Blair:
    Antonia shared a series of articles and resources she found for personalizing your terminal on a Mac with colors, fonts, and emojis:hatched_chick:! She shared a blog post on how to customize your command line prompt with an emoji and a website with the list of colors you can use to customize.

    In her own bash_profile (~/.bash_profile) Antonia included a unicorn emoji, pink heart, and dollar sign with the following code:

      export PS1='🦄 \e[95m❤\e[0m $'
    custom-prompt

The Show and Tell ran longer than planned, which ultimately cut into hacking and coding time. For the next event I will be sure to keep better track of the timing!

HOST INTRODUCTIONS

Felice and Sanchita shared some of the interesting engineering and data science projects from the Equinox tech team and emphasized their teams’ focus on creating a member experience that is as seamless and pleasant as possible. We learned about the work culture at Equinox, including the group fitness classes (:muscle: are you surprised?), and some of the amazing contributions that both Felice and Sanchita have made in their positions as engineers at Equinox.

In addition to the functional space, the event sponsor Equinox was kind enough to provide pizza and soft beverages for the event, and Felice brought a homemade pumpkin pie.

Equinox Technology

To learn about job opportunities at Equinox, follow THIS LINK or you can reach out to the technical recruiter Hannah Schreck.

ATTENDEE INTRODUCTIONS

We went around the room to give attendees the opportunity to introduce themselves, share a little about their experience with Python, and finally what they hoped to accomplish for the evening. There were some interesting trends amongst attendees:

  • Many people had never coded in Python and hoped to learn from some starter materials
  • There were a few journalists in the room
  • A significant number of attendees were interested in chatbots
  • Some wanted to learn or improve their proficiency in a specific visualization libraries
  • Someone brought a regular expressions textbook to practice

HACK/CODING

Based on individuals’ vocalized goals for the evening, attendees separated into pairs/groups with similar interests or worked on personal projects.

For those that weren’t sure what to work on or were just getting started with Python, we shared a list containing ideas and inspiration. The list isn’t very long at the moment, but we hope that it will become a dynamic repository for PyLadies to share their favorite resources. There has also been some concern that the list contains too many buzzwords and does not include clarifying desriptions which will be addressed as it is updated.

WRAP UP

We lost track of time and forgot to do the ten minute wrap up at the end of the event. We would like to try to incorporate this into the next study group because it could be helpful for community members to share their accomplishments with the group and take note of whether their own expectations were realistic.

In summary, we had a fun-spirited and productive first study group. If you haven’t already done so, sign up for the December Study Group! We would love to have you join our community and look forward to your suggestions.

You can learn about upcoming NYC PyLadies events by joining the Meetup group or following us on Twitter.

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