Welcome to issue 197 of Python Weekly

Welcome to issue 197 of Python Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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News

PyCon PL 2015 Call for Proposal 
We are pleased to announce that Call for Proposal for PyCon PL 2015 is open. We encourage everyone who is working with Python to submit his/her proposal. We are looking for a large variety of subjects on different levels of expertise from beginners to professionals. The deadline for proposal submission is 15th of July.


Articles, Tutorials and Talks

Episode #13: Flask web framework and much, much more
Did you know that Flask has its origins in an April fools joke that unexpectedly took off? Listen in this week to hear about the history, current state, and future of Flask with its creator Armin Ronacher. You'll learn how he's using Python as the backend for a set of major computer games. His thoughts on the future of web development and HTTP 2. And why Rust is an amazing new language you should check out. 

Neural Nets for Newbies
"Neural Nets for Newbies" is geared to provide clarity on what neural networks are, how to start using them and why they are valuable -- feature engineering. This talk is targeted to anyone who is passionate about understanding algorithms and code to define and leverage patterns in data.

Document Clustering with Python
This guide will explain how to cluster a set of documents using Python. The motivating example is to identify the latent structures within the synopses of the top 100 films of all time (per an IMDB list).

Create a REST API in Minutes With Pyramid and Ramses
This tutorial is meant for beginners where we'll show you how to go from zero to your own production-ready backend in a few minutes.

Learn to scrape and build a Reddit API in Python (Flask)
Lets learn how to scrape a website and build an API out of it! For educational purposes, lets scrape Reddit. We will be using Beautiful Soup and Flask in this tutorial. 

Podcast.__init__ Episode 11
In this episode, we talk with Tracy Osborn, Naomi Ceder and Lynn Root on Women and Diversity in Python.

Unisex names - Data Analysis Use Case
I've seen many websites talking about top 10 unisex names or how to choose a cool unisex name for your baby, but I don't know those so-called unisex names are based on what criteria and the authors there don't say how they got them in the first place. In this article, I present a real way to get unisex names based on historical data of used baby names as far back as the year 1880.

Bumping or Escaping Local Minima
What is bumping? Bumping is a simple algorithm that can help your classifier escape from a local minimum. Huh? Read on, after a few imports you will see what I mean.

Data Science 101: Interactive Analysis with Jupyter, Pandas and Treasure Data
In this article, we'll show you how to access Treasure Data from Pandas, and visualize and manipulate the data interactively via Jupyter.

LazySorted: A Lazily, Partially Sorted Python List
LazySorted is a Python C extension implementing a partially and lazily sorted list data structure. It solves a common problem faced by programmers, in which they need just part of a sorted list, like its middle element (the median), but sort the entire list to get it. LazySorted presents them with the abstraction that they are working with a fully sorted list, while actually only sorting the list partially with quicksort partitions to return the requested sub-elements. This enables programmers to use naive "sort first" algorithms but nonetheless attain linear run-times when possible. LazySorted may serve as a drop-in replacement for the built-in sorted function in most cases, and can sometimes achieve run-times more than 7 times faster.

Estimating a Real Business Cycle DSGE Model by Maximum Likelihood in Python
This notebook demonstrates how to setup, solve, and estimate a simple real business cycle model in Python. The model is very standard; the setup and notation here is a hybrid of Ruge-Murcia (2007) and DeJong and Dave (2011).

What are some things every Python developer should know for developing on Windows?
    
Job Salary Prediction with Python

Simplifying scikit-learn Predictive Modeling with skll APIs and Configuration Files


Books

Beginning Python Games Development, Second Edition: With PyGame
Beginning Python Games Development, Second Edition teaches you how to create compelling games using Python and the PyGame games development library. It will teach you how to create visuals, do event handling, create 3D games, add media elements, and integrate OpenGL into your Python game.


Python Jobs of the Week

Lead Engineer (Full Stack) at DocNav Labs
You will be the technical lead. The position is a chance to contribute to and shape the future of a unique product with far-ranging applications. Primary responsibilities will be day-to-day development along with helping plan the product roadmap, building out the technical team, and managing outside development resources. 

Senior Software Engineer (Web Backend) at Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs is looking for passionate Senior Software Engineers (Web Backend) to add to its growing web development team. A typical day will involve working in cross functional projects to build out features that will improve the reliability of Sauce's testing platform. These projects will include monitoring and identifying performance bottlenecks, proposing solutions to remove such bottlenecks, building internal tools and investing into our web application stack to enable agile development. 
    
Senior Software Engineer at Research Affiliates
Design in-house systems for algorithmic portfolio construction and asset allocation control and monitoring. Work on the full-stack in pure Python 3, using a hybrid functional / OO framework. Help us create and maintain a fast, modular architecture for the hundreds of portfolios we build based on cutting-edge research in asset allocation. Be part of a development team in Investment Management where your work gets noticed, your users are your colleagues, and you have the opportunity to make radical contributions. 


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

MSAF
A Python framework to analyze music structure. This framework contains a set of algorithms to segment a given music audio signal into its different musical sections (e.g., verse, chorus). 

Hypatia
Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike.

Visual Alchemist
Visual Alchemist is a web app to seamlessly create sqlalchemy models by dragging/dropping objects in a canvas.

DIE
DIE is an IDA python plugin designed to enrich IDA`s static analysis with dynamic data. This is done using the IDA Debugger API, by placing breakpoints in key locations and saving the current system context once those breakpoints are hit.

FuzzyFinder
Fuzzy Finder implemented in Python. Matches partial string entries from a list of strings. Works similar to fuzzy finder in SublimeText and Vim's Ctrl-P plugin.

Highlander
Highlander is a decorator to help developers ensure that their python process is only running once. This is helpful when you have a python program running on a set schedule (i.e., a cron) and you do not want one run of the program to overlap with another run. 

Postie
Postie is a command line utility for batch sending emails and text messages. 

deepy
Highly extensible deep learning framework based on Theano.

Spearmint
Spearmint is a software package to perform Bayesian optimization. The Software is designed to automatically run experiments (thus the code name spearmint) in a manner that iteratively adjusts a number of parameters so as to minimize some objective in as few runs as possible.

PiScope
This python library can turn your Raspberry Pi into an Oscilloscope or XY plotter. Simply, interface an Analog to Digital Converter with your Raspberry Pi and use the library to view the analog signals on your Raspberry Pi. 


New Releases

IPython 3.2 Released
This release contains important security fixes.