I attended one of the TriPython Group’s meetups at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at their office off-campus. In the meetup, someone introduced us to PyData Carolinas, which is a conference in September that brings the Python data analysis community together to share ideas. He showed us a webpage which I noted (http://pydata.org/carolinas2016/) and if I am still in the area at that time I would attend it. Afterwards, we each introduced ourselves to the group and what we were working on.

The main organizer used Python for working with Hurricane data and there were some people there who came from a bioinformatics background and some others who were just hobbyists. Overall, I liked the open and supportive atmosphere. We were encouraged to work on whatever interested us and to ask for help if needed. During this time, I decided on a dataset to use for my final project and completed my final project work plan. I decided to work on election data that I found on Kaggle.

I wasn’t quite sure how to get started in Cloud 9 so I began working on my project in PyCharm. I managed to get all of my data into tables and created one of the dictionaries that I will be using to answer user queries. Overall, it was very productive and I learned about another opportunity (Pydata Carolinas) to get more involved in the community. I think I will be using Python quite a bit in the future since I intend to focus on data anaylsis so I will probably attend the Pydata conference. I will most likely be in DC around that time, which is very convenient because it turns out that there is a Pydata conference in DC as well (http://pydata.org/dc2016/)!