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Brian #1: pyjanitor - for cleaning data


originally a port of an R package called janitor, now much more.
“pyjanitor’s etymology has a two-fold relationship to “cleanliness”. Firstly, it’s about extending Pandas with convenient data cleaning routines. Secondly, it’s about providing a cleaner, method-chaining, verb-based API for common pandas routines.”
functionality:

Cleaning columns name (multi-indexes are possible!)
Removing empty rows and columns
Identifying duplicate entries
Encoding columns as categorical
Splitting your data into features and targets (for machine learning)
Adding, removing, and renaming columns
Coalesce multiple columns into a single column
Convert excel date (serial format) into a Python datetime format
Expand a single column that has delimited, categorical values into dummy-encoded variables

This pandas code:


df = pd.DataFrame(...) # create a pandas DataFrame somehow.
del df['column1'] # delete a column from the dataframe.
df = df.dropna(subset=['column2', 'column3']) # drop rows that have empty values in column 2 and 3.
df = df.rename({'column2': 'unicorns', 'column3': 'dragons'}) # rename column2 and column3
df['newcolumn'] = ['iterable', 'of', 'items'] # add a new column.
- looks like this with pyjanitor:
df = (
pd.DataFrame(...)
.remove_columns(['column1'])
.dropna(subset=['column2', 'column3'])
.rename_column('column2', 'unicorns')
.rename_column('column3', 'dragons')
.add_column('newcolumn', ['iterable', 'of', 'items'])
)


Michael #2: What Does It Take To Be An Expert At Python?


Presentation at PyData 2017 by James Powell
Covers Python Data Model (dunder methods)
Covers uses of Metaclasses
All done very smoothly as a series of demos
Pretty long and in depth, 1.5+ hours


Brian #3: Awesome Python Applications


pypi is a great place to find great packages you can use as examples for the packages you write. Where do you go for application examples? Well, now you can go to Awesome Python Applications.
categories of applications included:
internet, audio, video, graphics, games, productivity, organization, communication, education, science, CMS, ERP (enterprise resource planning), static site generators, and a whole slew of developer related applications.
Mahmoud is happy to have help filling this out, so if you know of a great open source application written in Python, go ahead and contribute to this, or open an issue on this project.


Michael #4: Django Core no more


Write up by James Bennett
If you’re not the sort of person who closely follows the internals of Django’s development, you might not know there’s a draft proposal to drastically change the project’s governance.
What’s up: Django the open-source project is OK right now, but difficulty in recruiting and retaining enough active contributors.
Some of the biggest open-source projects dodge this by having, effectively, corporate sponsorship of contributions.
Django has become sort of a victim of its own success: the types of easy bugfixes and small features that often are the path to growing new committers have mostly been done already in Django.
Not managed to bring in new committers at a sufficient rate to replace those who’ve become less active or even entirely inactive, and that’s not sustainable for much longer.
Under-attracting women contributors too
Governance: Some parallels to what the Python core devs are experiencing now. Project leads BDFLs stepped down.
The proposal: what I’ve proposed is the dissolution of “Django core”, and the revocation of almost all commit bits

Seems extreme but they were working much more as a team with PRs, etc anyway.
Breaks down the barrier to needing to be on the core team to suggest, change anything.
Two roles would be formalized — Mergers and Releasers — who would, respectively, merge pull requests into Django, and package/publish releases. But rather than being all-powerful decision-makers, these would be bureaucratic roles



Br