Announcing the pyOpenSci Fall Festival!
This post was last updated on September 26, 2024
Happening October 28–November 1, 2024, the pyOpenSci Fall Festival is an online community training and networking event designed to empower scientists with in-demand open science skills. Our goals for the Fall Festival are to:
- empower you with technically-relevant open science skills,
- call attention to and celebrate new and upcoming tools that support open reproducible science
- build community, and
- help raise funds for pyOpenSci operations that allow us to continue supporting community work.
Interested? Read on to learn more!
pyOpenSci’s 2024 Fall Festival logistics:
- What: An online community training and networking event
- Where: Online using SpatialChat (learn more about SpatialChats’s system requirements here
- When: Monday, October 28–Friday, November 01, 2024
- Who: If you are a scientist, a researcher, a student, or anyone interested in writing better, cleaner code that can be installed into different environments and shared, then this event is for you!
- Cost - Day 1 Keynote talks: free.
- Cost- workshops: $350–$625, with scholarships available
pyOpenSci’s Fall Festival registration, cost, and scholarship information
Important: The agenda items in EventBrite are listed in UTC-6:00- This is an EventBrite bug. If you need clarification on start times, please email us at media@pyopensci.org.
Pricing tiers
We’ve created several pricing tiers to make the Fall Festival accessible to as many people as possible.
Day one - October 28, 2024: Keynote talks
Keynote talks are free for anyone to attend. Register now before we fill up!
| Time | Speaker | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30am - 8:40 AM UTC-6 | Leah Wasser | Meeting room opens |
| 8:40am - 8:55 AM UTC-6 | Leah Wasser | Welcome to the Fall Festival - pyOpenSci, open source and open science |
| 9:00am - 9:50 AM UTC-6 | Eric Mah | Open Science, biomedical work and LLMs |
| 10:00am - 10:50 AM UTC-6 | Melissa Mendoça | The value of open source for open science |
| 11:00am - 11:50 PM UTC-6 | Rowan Crocket | Catalyzing how scientists publish using MystMarkdown |
Days 2-4 - 29 October - November 1, 2024: Technical Workshops
The general schedule for each days’ event is below:
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 8:45am - 1:00 PM UTC-6 | Online Training |
| 2:00pm - 4:00 PM UTC-6 | Online Office Hours |
Friday’s event will begin at 8:30 to support 2 speakers.
You can register for a single-day workshop or the full event. Workshop registration includes office hours each day for more one-on-one help in the afternoon.
| Registration Type | Cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Day One Keynote Talks - October 28 2024 | Free | |
| Full 4-day Workshop: Student | $350 | |
| Full 4-day Workshop: Standard | $475 | |
| Full 4-day Workshop: Corporate | $625 | |
| Single Day Workshop: Student | $100 | |
| Single Day Workshop: Standard | $150 | |
| Single Day Workshop: Corporate | $200 |
Scholarships
If you are financially unable to attend pyOpenSci’s Fall Festival, you can apply for a scholarship using this form. We will be accepting scholarship applications through October 24th, but review will begin on October 15, with priority given to early applications.
Click to apply for a scholarship.
pyOpenSci Fall Festival events
Our Fall Festival is a series of events that make it easy to connect with others, listen to inspiring talks, and learn at a pace that is comfortable for you.
Monday, October 28th: Kickoff and keynotes
Join us on Monday, October 28, for a morning of impactful keynote talks from 3 incredible speakers.
These Fall Festival keynote talks are free for anyone to attend. They will be recorded and published on the pyOpenSci YouTube channel after the event.
Our speakers for the Fall Festival are:
We’ll also hold “Day 0” office hours for all registered workshop attendees. Drop into our Day 0 office hours to say hello, get used to using our online platform, Gather, and get help with any computer setup issues you might have before the workshops begin.
We want to set you up for learning success!
Keynote speaker bios
Eric Ma As Senior Principal Data Scientist at Moderna Eric leads the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (Research) team to accelerate science to the speed of thought. Prior to Moderna, he was at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research conducting biomedical data science research with a focus on using Bayesian statistical methods in the service of discovering medicines for patients. Prior to Novartis, he was an Insight Health Data Fellow in the summer of 2017 and defended his doctoral thesis in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT in the spring of 2017.
Eric is also an open-source software developer and has led the development of pyjanitor, a clean API for cleaning data in Python, and nxviz, a visualization package for NetworkX. He is also on the core developer team of NetworkX and PyMC. In addition, he gives back to the community through code contributions, blogging, teaching, and writing.
His personal life motto is found in the Gospel of Luke 12:48.
Melissa Mendoça I am a Senior DevEx Engineer at Quansight, working on NumPy, SciPy and other open source projects. I care deeply about teaching, mentoring, and have been involved in the Python community for some time. You can find most of my talk slides here on github or in my website; feel free to use those according to the licenses stated in each repo/presentation.
💬 Ask me about NumPy, SciPy, napari, Fortran, LaTeX, mathematical optimization, numerical linear algebra, Contributor Experience.
Rowan is the CEO and founder of Curvenote, where we build tools to free science from static PDF documents such that the scientific community can share more interactive, reproducible, and richly-linked scientific content. Curvenote provides an all-in-one publishing platform for researchers, societies and institutes, with a focus on computational research.
Rowan is also on the steering-council for JupyterBook and MyST Markdown, which is part of Project Jupyter and provides widely used open-source tools for authoring and sharing scientific content. Rowan has a Ph.D. in computational geophysics from the University of British Columbia (UBC). While at UBC, Rowan helped start SimPEG, a large-scale simulation and parameter estimation package for geophysical processes (electromagnetics, fluid-flow, gravity, etc.), which is used in industry, national labs, and universities globally.
Rowan has won multiple awards for innovative dissemination of research and open-educational resources, including a geoscience modeling application, Visible Geology, that has been used by more than a million geoscience students to interactively explore conceptual geologic models. In his previous role as the VP of Cloud Architecture at Seequent, Rowan ran a large software team working on computational software platforms, visualization tools, and version control systems for geoscientists.
Tuesday, October 29th–Friday, November 01st - Technical workshops
Every workshop day of the pyOpenSci Fall Festival will follow a similar format.
Some days will kick off with an inspirational and technically related talk
All days will include:
- A hands-on, interactive workshop with highly-qualified instructors and a group of knowledgeable, dedicated support volunteers.
- A lengthy lunch break
- Optional afternoon office hours, where registered attendees can get further help and support with the topics covered during the morning workshop
pyOpenSci’s Fall Festival workshop agendas
Tuesday, October 29th: Write modular, clean code
When developing a data processing workflow, it’s tempting to start at the “top” and write each line of code needed to process your data. Or you may ask a LLM to write your code for you. However, this approach often makes maintaining code less efficient and complex. In this workshop, you will learn how to think about developing the code needed to process your data more efficiently.
You will learn how to:
- Describe and organize the steps needed to create your workflow using pseudocode. Pseudocode is not only helpful in organizing your workflow; it is also what an AI-coding assistant tool such as ChatGPT or GitHub CoPilot requires to build a workflow for you.
- Create expressive, human-readable variable and function names to make your code easier to read and maintain.
- Create well-documented functions to perform repeated tasks. Functions allow you to make your code more modular and reduce the number of variables your code produces and stores in memory. LLMs can be helpful here, too, once you understand what you need to accomplish.
- Add tests and checks to your function to ensure your workflow runs as expected and handles messy data issues gracefully.
- Organize your workflow into modules, functions, and scripts that run and process your data.
This workshop will help you transform messy, hard-to-manage code into clean, efficient, and reusable Python workflows. Over 3-4 hours, you’ll learn the core concepts of refactoring your code so that it’s easier to understand, maintain, and share with others. We’ll start by looking at how to break down repetitive tasks into smaller, reusable functions or objects. Refactoring will make your code more organized and save you time in the long run by reducing the amount of repetitive work.
Next, we’ll focus on writing code that’s functional and easy to read. Using clear, descriptive names and well-structured logic, you’ll learn to write code that others (and your future self) can easily understand and modify. We’ll also cover how to manage your code’s use of memory and compute power, ensuring that your scripts run efficiently. Once the core concepts are understood, you will use LLM’s to make your code more modular and easier to read and maintain. You will add functions needed to process your data reusable into a new Python module.
By the end of the workshop, you’ll have refactored your code into a well-organized module. This module will then serve as the foundation for the second workshop, where you’ll learn how to turn it into a fully-fledged Python package that you can install and reuse across different projects and in different Python environments. This step-by-step approach will equip you with the skills to create robust, maintainable Python workflows for processing, visualizing, and analyzing data.
Wednesday, October 30th: Create a Python package
Summary
In the second Fall Festival workshop, you’ll learn how to turn a Python module and script into an installable package. Optionally, you’ll also learn how to add a script to a Python package so you can call it at the command line using Python package entry points. We will provide a module and script from Workshop 1 that you can use to complete Workshop 2.
Packaging your code makes sharing, reproducing, and reusing your work easier—a fundamental element of open science. Packaging your Python code ensures it can be easily reused across different environments and workflows, whether locally, in the cloud, or when collaborating with others. Packaged code simplifies your work by allowing you to reuse your code in various projects. It also enhances your ability to share your tools with the broader scientific community, making your contributions more accessible and impactful.
In the first workshop of the pyOpenSci Fall Festival, you learned how to turn a Python script into a maintainable command-line script that imports modular functionality from a well-written Python module. You can use the work you did in workshop 1 in this workshop.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the pyproject.toml file, a modern and straightforward way to define your package’s metadata, dependencies, and setup instructions. We’ll also introduce Hatch, a powerful tool that simplifies the packaging process, ensuring you can install your package into any Python environment with a single command. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have the skills to transform your code into a Python package ready for distribution and use by others.
This workshop will help you make your code more accessible and reproducible. You’ll leave with a fully functional Python package created from your own module. Whether you’re new to Python packaging or looking to refine your skills, this workshop will equip you with the tools and knowledge to distribute your scientific code efficiently and effectively.
Thursday, October 31st: Share your code
Summary
In Workshop 3: share your code, you will learn the essential steps to make your Python packages publicly available and easily installable. You’ll start by setting up your package on GitHub, enabling others to pip install it directly. You’ll also learn how to integrate Zenodo to assign a DOI to your package, allowing it to be cited in academic works, with easy updates for each new release. If there is time, the workshop will guide you through creating package releases, setting up GitHub Actions to automate the publication process to PyPI, and using Test PyPI with Hatch to ensure everything works smoothly before going live. Finally, you will learn how to publish your package to (test) PyPI and conda-forge as a stepping stone to publishing to the real PyPI. While the workshop will introduce the process of creating a Conda-Forge recipe, the actual publication to Conda-forge will be something you can explore further on your own
By the end of this workshop, you know how to share your Python packages with the broader community effectively. You’ll understand how to automate critical aspects of the release process, making it easier to maintain and update your packages over time. Overall, you’ll leave this workshop empowered to contribute your code to the open-source ecosystem in a way that is accessible, citable, and well-maintained.
Friday, November 1: Reproducible reports and presentations with Quarto and Great Tables
Morning talks
We’ll be opening this session with two incredible talks on Quarto from James Balamuta and George Stagg!
Workshop
If you want to use data to make decisions, answer scientific questions, inform people on issues or participate in data-driven journalism, just conducting the data analysis is not enough. Effective communication requires weaving together narrative text and code to produce elegantly formatted output that people can easily read and understand. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use Quarto for reports and presentations and Great Tables for elegantly formatted tables to convey information that’s great for the readers, and easy for you to create too. Quarto is an open source tool based on Pandoc that allows you to create and publish reproducible, production-quality articles, presentations, dashboards, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, and more, right from your Jupyter notebooks.
With Great Tables you can make wonderful-looking tables in Python. Great Tables is an open source Python package that lets you mix and match things like a header and footer, attach a stub (which contains row labels), arrange spanner labels over top of the column labels, and much more. Not only that, but you can format the cell values in a variety of awesome ways.
Speakers and instructors
We’ll continue to update this section with more information as we confirm speakers and instructors for the event!
- Leah Wasser
- Eric Ma
- Melissa Mendoça
- Rowan Cockett
- Carol Willing
- Jeremiah Paige
- James Balamuta
- George Stagg
- Tracy Teal
- Rich Iannone
Volunteers
Are you interested in volunteering? Please contact fallfestival@pyopensci.org to stay up to date about any event needs!
FAQ
How do I apply for a scholarship?
If you are financially unable to attend pyOpenSci’s Fall Festival, you can apply for a scholarship using this form. We will be accepting scholarship applications through October 24th, but review will begin on October 15, with priority given to early applications.
Can I register for a single day?
Yes! You can register for the entire event or buy tickets for one, two, or three days. To stay up to date on any changes to our ticketing for the pyOpenSci Fall Festival, be sure to follow us on Fosstodon or LinkedIn.
What if I purchased a ticket but can no longer attend?
All refunds are processed through Eventbrite, and will be accepted until October 21, 2024. You will receive a refund for the price of your ticket minus any service fees.
If you purchased your ticket after October 21, 2024 you will be ineligible for a refund, however you may donate it to another learner. To do so, please email fallfestival@pyopensci.org.
How will pyOpenSci use my registration information?
pyOpenSci will use your registration information to send you information related to the Fall Festival, as well as to send you both pre- and post-surveys related to the Fall Festival.
How can I help promote the Fall Festival?
We would love for you to share your excitement and enthusiasm with your peers, both in-person and on social media! You’re welcome to use any of the images that we’ve shared on social media related to the event. We’d also love it if you tag us in anything that you share!
Will the Fall Festival workshops be recorded?
We will only record the keynote talks on Monday, October 28, 2024. The additional talks and workshops will not be recorded. If workshop instructors share their content online, we will be sure to share the relevant links both here and on social media.
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