James Mertz will give a brief overview of PyCon 2019 held in Cleveland, OH. He’ll cover some of the interesting talks, some cool announcements, show off some swag, and more.
About James
James is a Software Assurance Engineerng at Jet Propulsion Laboratory by day and author at RealPython.com by night.
In his spare time he also volunteers as a Scout Master for a local Pasadena Scout Troop.
Writing applications in a multi-core, multi-threaded, multiprocess, networked world means communicating between many threads and processes over shared memory, IPC, and the network. This often involves multiple low-level libraries (e.g. most languages’ built-in threading, unix IPC, Berkeley sockets) with different programming paradigms, and may require a potential a scaling bottleneck in the form of a central server or broker to make it all manageable. ZeroMQ claims to be a better alternative, providing a single, higher-level message-passing toolkit across threads, processes, and networks, and languages, and specifically supports decentralized messaging. That should make it a slower, clunkier compromise for any one task, but it claims to be both better and easier to use for any one of those problems than a dedicated library. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so we’ll examine how it compares to standard threading and networking facilities and see how easily we can just connect all the things like Lego bricks, regardless of type or underlying transport. Of course it wouldn’t be any fun without including some very informal performance smackdowns.
About Dustin Laurence
Intending to become a programmer ("developer" hadn't been invented by the marketing department yet), Dustin got sidetracked and spent more time than he cares to admit doing theoretical physics, a background filled with continuous mathematics almost entirely irrelevant to computer science. He eventually returned to his original love of software. He avoids social media for the same reason he doesn't do crack cocaine.
SGVHAK and Santa Susana HS will have a booth at the Caltech Science for March showcasing the rovers we built as part of the JPL Open Source Rover (beta build group. We'll also feature rovers that were inspired by the process, like Dave Flynn's Mr. Blue and Roger Cheng's Sawppy.
Event Location:
Du-Par's Restaurant and Bakery, 214 S Lake Ave, Pasadena
Lan and Roger will be giving a preview of our SCaLE 17x talk about the SGVHAK
Rover. Any feedback will be extremely helpful. We'll also be talking about
SCaLE, volunteering for SCaLE, and plans for our booth at SCaLE.
Dinner begins around 7pm and the presentation will start after most people
have received their food or 8pm, whichever comes first. Buying dinner is
optional.
The Trouble with Rovers
The JPL Open Source Rover is a relatively inexpensive and accessible project
for high school and college classes to exercise mechanical and electronics and
software engineering using parts that could be easily sourced from hobbyist
stores.
JPL beta-tested their build instructions at a few schools and with the SGVHAK
maker group. The ultimate goal was to refine the build instructions and grow a
community of experienced builders to help provide support once the rover
documentation and code were open sourced.
We will go over the experience of the SGVHAK maker group in building the
SGVHAK rover and being inspired to build rovers of our own design. The SGVHAK
maker group built the rover over the period of 3 months while giving JPL
significant feedback and build photos. We diverged from the original design
most significantly in the wheel design, motor selection, and software.
We were able to exhibit the SGVHAK rover at SCALE, the Caltech Science for
March, and the DTLA Mini Maker Faire. We were recently interviewed for the
Command_Line Heroes podcast. Building rovers is a never-ending process. The
SGVHAK rover itself is always under construction. We have plans to add a robot
arm, pan-tilt webcam, and maybe even lidar. Our members have already started
coming up with their own rover designs and builds. All the code and 3D printer
files are on GitHub. Come join us in our rover-building adventures.
About Lan
Lan Dang is an Operations Engineer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
specializing in science data systems operations and large scale data
processing. Her contributions to open source focus on community-building and
evangelism. In her spare time, she is active in the San Gabriel Valley tech
community as a leader of the SGVLUG and its sister group, the SGVHAK hardware
hacking group, mentors new hires at work as well as local high school and
college students, and volunteers with various STEAM groups and events. She is
the volunteer coordinator for the SCALE A/V team.
About Roger
An active member of the San Gabriel Valley Hardware Hackers group (SGVHAK) and
member of Linux User's Group (SGVLUG) Roger is interested in many topics
around the intersection of mechanical hardware and intelligent software.
Event Location:
Du-Par's Restaurant and Bakery, 214 S Lake Ave, Pasadena
Bring tech books and leftover conference swag to exchange with other members, or
put towards a swag pile for our SCaLE booth, if we have one. Anything that
nobody wants could be brought to Repair Cafe this weekend.
We also have a double-feature for this month's presentation, both given by new
member Sean Marquez.
How (and Why) to Choose an Open Source License
There is a common misconception that just because your code is public on GitHub
that it is open source, but unless there is a license in your codebase, then it
is by default copyrighted. This talk will cover an introduction to copyright,
open source, the types of open source licenses, how to go about choosing an
open source license for your project, and why should you choose to open
source your project.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Markdown
Markdown is the most commonly used lightweight markup language on the internet.
However, lately it has been adopted by the technical writing community as a
solution for writing documentation. This has made a lot of people very angry and
been widely regarded as a bad move.
BIO
Sean Marquez graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in
design of dynamic systems, from UC Irvine. During his undergrad, he project
managed a CubeSat program where he developed a passion for space exploration. He
worked for an OEM aerospace consulting firm for over a year as an associate
mechanical design engineer. In 2015, he joined and collaborated with an online
team, performing numerical simulations & control systems design, for rLoop – a
non-profit global think tank that won the innovation award for the first SpaceX
hyperloop pod competition. Sean is currently a worker-owner at Space Cooperative
Inc., involved with development and testing of smart contracts to be utilized by
the Space Decentral network, collaborating on Coral - an open source robotic
space mission to mine lunar regolith for in-situ resource utilization, and
leading efforts on the adoption of the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
methodology.
