RocPy Meetup!

Roc.py meetup was awesome!  Bizlegfoss class met at the University of Rochester for a Python User Group meeting.  It's been so long since I last attended Roc.py that I completely forgot about the weird setup of the room we usually set up in.  All the seats are facing the back of the room because, as my friend explained, it helps the professors see what the students are doing on the computers.

Anyway, the vast bulk of the time was taken up by a really awesome open source Python web project called "toyz" by a U of R PhD student named Fred (fred3m - https://github.com/fred3m/toyz).  The project is extremely useful for reducing and displaying things like gigantic images.  The specific example that Fred gave was astronomy images which can be several gigabytes in size, but load extremely quickly through toyz.  Fred said he made the program to help with his PhD and because he wanted to know he made something cool and worthwhile.  The program was "initially created as a way to view and interact with FITS images stored on a remote server as well as perform data reduction", and it is meant "to meet the needs of 'Big Data' scientists".

Personally, I thought this program was awesome, and was especially intrigued to find that Fred has put the project on Github and would encourage people to check it out.  His demo of the application framework was super cool, as he proved that it could load giant space images in mere seconds, which could then be zoomed in on for higher quality.  The user interface was also very legitimate and professional looking, along with some really cool graph display abilities.

Fred said he wanted to bring attention to the idea that this type of technology needs to be updated and made more accessible, and it was really cool to see that he was trying to do something about that.  After the toyz talk, there was still a bit of time left so anyone was allowed to give a lightning talk.  One of my fellow bizlegfoss students AJ(ajman1101 - github.com/ajman1101) gave an awesome talk about how all of the elements of multiplayer games have already been defined.  This was an extremely interesting topic for me being a Game Designer and Developer myself, and it was fun trying to categorize games that people have played into the categories that AJ gave.  Overall, a fun filled Roc.py!