The month of September was destined to be busy with the goodman out for his share of conferences. Nevertheless, my family rallied and the grandparents took complete charge of the monster-in-making. I actually managed to find time to attend more workshops, meetups and conferences than usual 🙂
So while casually chatting with Anwesha I found out about the second workshop at PICT(Pune Institute of Computer Technology) to be conducted by Kushal. I checked if I could join him for the workshop, primarily to learn and secondly to understand how a workshop is to be conducted.
The first workshop was Introduction to Python by Kushal and was a huge success with 40 girls attending it. This workshop was an extension, as requested by the students. Anwesha had introduced PyLadies, Pune chapter in the previous workshop and had met with a very enthusiastic response.
On our way, instead of discussing the talk, me and Kushal spoke about the world in general 🙂 So the topic was as new to me as for the participants of the workshop. We had a small felicitation event with the very knowledgeable HOD and the professors extending a very warm welcome to us. The students were trying their best to ensure we had everything we needed.
So the workshop began and I found out (well belatedly!) that the topic was the argparse (command-line parsing module in the Python standard library) module.
Kushal’s love to teach was apparent in the way he conducted the workshop. It is a pity he cannot do this fulltime 🙂 He seemed much more approachable than the sessions @dgplug. He was stern, nevertheless went through the workshop with a lot of patience. Almost the entire class of 50 was able to grasp the concept and work on the tasks. I would work on the problems myself, once done I would walk around helping the students if anyone needed any assistance – a teaching assistant, if I may say so. At the end of the workshop we had made a command line using positional, optional arguments. Both me and Kushal were delighted to see some students try a lot of new things on their own
We ended the session with some gyaan about work ethics, the open source way of life, contributing to open source projects, importance of hard work, even disclosed pay packages of some contributors (gasp!), how to get on IRC, PyLadies, PythonPune and so much more.
Some queries we face at every meetup, every workshop-
- PyLadies is ONLY for ladies? We are focused on providing a support network for everyone, primarily ladies.
- What is IRC? A great way to get in touch with open source developers around the globe. Go to http://webchat.freenode.net –> Create your account –> Download xchat –> In “Networks”, find and select “FreeNode” and join any or all of the following channels – #pyladies, #python, #dgplug
- Do we need to need to know all about data structures and algorithms to become programmers? I will never forget the boys face who asked this and we told him he doesn’t need to 🙂
Our return journey was a lot of talk about how talented the students were and we hoped that at least a couple of students would be inspired as we were at some point in our lives 🙂
