This weekend we ran PyDataLondon 2018, the fifth iteration of our conference (connected with our monthly PyDataLondon meetup). This year we grew to 500 attendees! Read about the past PyDataLondon 2017 here.
Updates– videos are online, reportedly we raised £91,000 towards open source support for NumFOCUS via ticket sales & sponsorship (all the London team are unpaid volunteers, this money goes back to NumFOCUS to support the PyData ecosystem).
Here’s a summary of what we covered with 500 attendees over 3 days:
- Packed schedule
- Three new chair persons – Marco, Cecilia and Florian– thanks for making the conference so great!
- Two sessions of lightning talks
- Book signing with Holden Karau (Spark), Steve Holden (Python Core) and myself (High Performance Python)
- Algorithmic arthackathon
- Pandas Sprint
- Hackathons for Art and Politics and Open Source Contributions
- A bigger and crazier Pub Quiz by the inimitable James Powell
- Slack channel to support collaboration
- Diversity lunch
- Creche
- Beginner bootcamp the day before the conference (thanks Conrad!)
- Look here for many more photos!
- Write-ups from co-chairs Cecilia and Marco and colleagues Miguel and Mark
On Thursday morning I co-ran a “Make your first open source contribution” with Nick (of PyDataEdinburgh). We had a group who’d rarely (or never) made a contribution to github. We managed to commit a couple of minor doc fixes, recreated a bug in ELI5 and subsequently a new (failing) test was submitted to the project. Great success! I’m interested in another bug if you want to make a contribution.
Great example of how to include the new starters in the community. Way to go @ianozsvald, @njr0 and @pydatalondon! #PyDataLDNhttps://t.co/K9sq4mRUJ7
— Miguel Martinez (@miguelmalvarez) April 28, 2018
Each room was packed with 150-200 people (with a comfy number of chairs for everyone!):
Great to be back at #PyDataLDN again! Really interesting talks this morning on modelling techniques and evaluation from Anna Veronika Dorogush @yandexcom, Thomas Huijskens and @ianozsvald. pic.twitter.com/qVTaOiOMNV
— Andrew Weeks (@meloncholy) April 28, 2018
One of our key NumFOCUS organisers is Leah Silen, she’s an unsung hero who makes every conference come together. She broke her foot recently and couldn’t fly over. Itturns out the crowdrathermisses her and all of herwork. Get well soon!
At the conference I spoke on “Creating Correct and Capable Classifiers” (worked Notebook in my github repo). We took a look at starting with a baseline model, building a better stable model, visualising errors, diagnosing where it might be failing and explaining the end results to a colleague.
Many thanks to @matti of PyDataBerlin for taking a lovely photo of our speaker-duck gift for speakers:
Many thanks also to all of our volunteers and to the staff at the Tower Hotel – thanks for making the weekend so much fun 
Ian applies Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in ModelInsight and in his Mor Consulting, sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London. He also founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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