Category: Chicago

ChiPy Python Mentorship Dinner March 2015

Chicago Python Users group Mentorship program for 2015 is officially live! It is a three month long program, where we pair up a new Pythonista with an experienced one to help them improve as developers. Encouraged by the success of last year, we decided to do it in a grander scale this time. Last night ChiPy and Computer Futures hosted a dinner for the mentors at Giordano’s Pizzeria to celebrate the kick off – deep dish, Chicago style!

The Match Making:

Thanks to the brilliant work by the mentor and mentees from 2014, we got a massive response as soon as we opened the registration process this year. While the number of mentee applications grew rapidly, we were unable to get enough mentors and had to limit the mentee applications to 30. Of them, 8 were Python beginners, 5 were interested in web development, 13 in Data Science, and rest in Advanced Python. After some interwebs lobbying, some  arm twisting mafia tactics, we finally managed to get 19 mentees hooked up with their mentors. 

Based on my previous experience at pairing mentor and mentees, the relationship works out only if there is a common theme of interest between the two. To make the matching process easier, I focused on getting a full-text description of their background & end goals as well as their LinkedIn data. From what I heard last night from the mentors, the matches have clicked!

The Mentors’ Dinner:
As ChiPy organizers, we are incredibly grateful to these 19 mentors, who are devoting their time to help the Python community in Chicago. Last night’s dinner was a humble note of thanks to them. Set in the relaxed atmosphere of the pizzeria, stuffed with pizza and beer, it gave us an opportunity to talk and discuss how we can make the process more effective for both the mentor and mentees. 

Trading of ideas and skills:
The one-to-one relationship of the mentor and mentee gives the mentee enough comfort for saying – “I don’t get it, please help!”. It takes away the fear of being judged, which is a problem in a traditional classroom type learning. But to be fair to the mentor, it is impossible for him/her to be master of everything Python and beyond. That is why we need to trade ideas and skills. Last time when one of the mentor/mentee pairs needed some help designing an RDBMS schema, one of the other mentors stepped in and helped them complete it much faster. Facilitating such collaboration brings out the best resources in the community. Keeping these in mind we have decided to use ChiPy’s meetup.com discussion threads to keep track of the progress of our mentor and mentee pairs. Here is the first thread introducing what the mentor and mentee are working on.

Some other points that came out of last night’s discussion:

  • We were not able to find mentors for our Advanced Python track. Based on the feedback we decided to rebrand it to Python Performance Optimization for next time.
  • Each mentor/mentee pair will be creating their own curriculum. Having a centralized repository of those will make them reusable
  • Reaching out to Python shops in Chicago for mentors. The benefit of this is far reaching. If a company volunteers their experienced developers as mentors, it could serve like a free apprenticeship program and pave the way in recruiting interns, contractors and full time hires. Hat-tip to Catherine for this idea.

Lastly, I want to thank our sponsor – Computer Futures, for being such a gracious hosts. They are focused on helping Pythonistas find the best Python job that are out there. Thanks for seeing the value in what we are doing and hope we can continue to work together to help the Python community in Chicago. 

If you are interested in learning more about being a mentor or a mentee, feel free to reach out to me. Join ChiPy’s meetup.com community to learn more about what’s next for the mentor and mentees. 

The Third Meetup

Last Tuesday was our third meetup for Chuck Eesley’s venture-lab.org. Instead of the Michigan Street Starbucks opposite to The Chicago Tribune, we pivoted to the Wormhole for this one. For any geek who has been to this place, knows what a riot it is. From “Back to the Future” time-machine retro-fitted on the ceiling, old atari cartridges as showpieces on the coffee-table, super typo-friendly wifi password, stopwatch controlled brewing, Starwars puppets, shopkeep.com app on ipad instead of cashbox – the bearded coffee masters had it all. Everything except a place to accommodate the thunderous 8 of Lake Effect Ventures.

Two hours of caffeine drenched brainstorming spitted out the following:

  1. I sketched out how the process might flow in two steps.  We are down to a pretty bare minimum concept build which is ideal both for this class and for getting something up quickly so that we can test it.
  2. I set up a Twitter account for Lake Effect Ventures so that we can tweet about progress we are making.
  3. Andy is going to jot up a positioning statement and beef up the business model canvas for the concept
  4. Leandre will use these to complete our 2-slide initial submission for our deliverable for the next deadline
  5. Leandre will also use this to start to craft a presentation deck
  6. Benn will be working on the copy for the landing page that I started.
  7. Benn will also be crafting a logo in Photoshop (Alex, Zak, Sidi if any one of you is good with design Benn would appreciate the assistance there)
  8. We need to think of a name for the concept as well

We think it is a bit premature to start on the user stories right now given that we have a good idea of what we are gonna build. Charles and me are gonna start on that and look to have something complete from a Version 1.0 standpoint by mid next week barring no setbacks. We will look to craft the user stories once we complete the MVP and use them as structure for testing features and functionality (Zak stay tuned on this)
Benn and Andy will also be working on putting together a more formal customer survey so that we structure the interviews we are having and start to compile meaningful data which we will need going forward.
Its getting exciting ….