Why PyData Long Island?

Long Island is home to almost 8 million people, 40% of New York State’s population. Our local economy has a GDP of about $200 Billion. We have a very diverse economy, from high tech to agriculture. We live in New York City’s shadow, but we are a massive entity all our own. It stands to reason that we would have as much of a need for data science as NYC itself. At a cursory glance, we could easily have a vibrant Python / Analytics community. Just look at local companies I’ve identified as having some form of Python interest and/or capabilities, based on Indeed job postings:

• Northrup Grumman
• Northwell Health
• Altice
• The New York Islanders
• PSEG LI
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• National Grid
• Nielsen
• Cardworks

In addition to these places, I believe there’s a shadow community of hundreds or even thousands of people out here who have come to Python via an unconventional path, or are just about to start their journey. Maybe they are the only person in their department, or even their company, who have even heard of Python and they are trying to figure out if it’s right for them. Maybe they’ve mastered the basics of Pandas and are looking to the frontiers of scikit-learn and, off in the distance, Deep Learning. PyData Long Island is for all of us.

Plans for the next few months

I plan to hold in-person meetings once a month at the North Bellmore Public Library’s community room. General structure will be announcements, and then a presentation on a data-related topic. An example of the topics that I have in mind:

https://github.com/oneextrafact/long-island-digest/blob/main/notebooks/1.0-daveg-reading-the-sitemap.ipynb

I’m also thinking of having an “office hours” type meeting every 2 weeks or so where people can ask for and receive help on performing analyses or even setting up development environments or working with tools like Github and Docker.

• 2022 4