A quick update with my impressions on the last PyData London meet-up I attended this evening.
I missed the past couple of meet-ups because of some clash on my personal schedule, so this was my first time in the new venue, still close to Old Street, hosted by Lyst. A nice big room to accomodate many many people (more than 200 probably?), and a nice selection of craft beers.
We started with the usual initial community-related announcements, including the impressive achievement of the group: 1,000+ members on the meetup.com dedicated page! Well done guys!
The core topic of the evening was data visualisation. For this reason, the main candidate for Python Module Of The Month was (… drum roll …) matplotlib :-D
The first talk, “Thinking about data visualisation”, was given by Andy Kirk from Visualising Data. Thinking was an important keyword of the presentation: after an initial comparison between talent (e.g. artistic, creative) vs thinking, Andy went on discussing different aspects of thinking and how our thinking can provide more value to the visualisation we are proposing. Long story short, you don’t have to be an artist to create useful visualisation, assuming you take the context and the overall story into account.
The second talk, “Lies, damned lies and dataviz”, was given by Andrew Clegg from Etsy. Andrew started the presentation with some argument in support of providing good dataviz, and then he continued with a great sequence of examples of bad dataviz, discussing how some of them simply confuse the user without providing any additional insight, while others really trick the user into wrong conclusions. Whether these are damned lies or just bad design choices… well that’s another story.
Both presentations were really great, and both of them technology-agnostic, which is something I enjoyed for some reason.
During the final lightning-and-community-talks, the interesting news was the announcement of a new O’Reilly book on data visualisation with Python and Javascript (link to come).
Overall a very nice evening, congratulations to all the organisers.
PyData London meetup.com group:
http://www.meetup.com/PyData-London-Meetup/
Marco Bonzanini 