December 11, 2014
Tonight, five short talks on a variety of subjects, sponsored by Indico.
Nate Aune: Docker + Open edX
Docker automates the deployment of applications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_software) by providing a layer of abstraction and automation of operating system–level virtualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system%E2%80%93level_virtualization) on Linux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux). Nate will demonstrate how to use Docker to easily run Open edX.
George Schneeloch: Docker for test automation
George put together a test framework that runs each functional test in a Docker container for easy reproduction of test failures.
Shauna Gordon-McKeon: WelcomeBot
WelcomeBot is an IRC bot. Shauna will discuss some of the things she learned while building WelcomeBot, including unit tests and how the socket library/how Python interacts with IRC protocols.
Justin Black: Wrapping a Finite Element Analysis tool
Justin will talk about wrapping other tools in python to make them more usable. Free FEA software is capable, but too complex for mechanical engineers to easily use. Python can be used to provide a simple powerful interface to existing tools.
Thomas Markovich: Teaching Python and Quantum Mechanics
Thomas will discuss how he took 40 students, most of whom had no prior programming experience, and taught them basic Python and intro quantum mechanics. The students literally went from not knowing how to write a for-loop to writing their own electronic structure package. He’ll discuss mistakes made along the way, and demo some of the students’ projects.
Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/events/202723912/