PyData London
@pydatalondon.bsky.social
470 followers 270 following 140 posts
https://london.pydata.org We run a monthly meetup and host the annual PyData London conference. PyData is an educational program of NumFOCUS, helping our community share ideas and learn from each other. https://www.meetup.com/PyData-London-Meetup/
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pydatalondon.bsky.social
Up next: @hevansdev.bsky.social Answering a dumb question with a smart bird feeder.

Is this robin abnormally large?
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Now hearing HangMAN vs AI - Kavit Tolia

Learnings building a custom transformer to play hangman.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Next up Why Python is the best language for algorithmic trading from @richardhickling.bsky.social
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Now hearing from Victor Zommers on his experiments getting LLMs to play Go. They were not good, not only losing to KataGo but also Wally, developed in 1981 with just 7 rules.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Next up we have Sam Joseph LLMs can tell jokes, but they’re pretty bad. Sam found he can breed better jokes using ideas from evolutionary computing—with pretty decent results!
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Our first talk tonight is from PyDatalondon founder @ianozsvald.bsky.social on his playgroup: a collaborative space to explore really difficult but interesting problems together like ARC AGI, diagnosing bugs agenically and making LLMs funny.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
From small beginnings to great things! @emlynclay.bsky.social tells us the history of PyData London.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
It’s finally time! 🥳 PyData London 100 is here! 💯
pydatalondon.bsky.social
It’s nearly time for our 100th Meetup! 🥳

Looking forward to a full roster of lightning talks, reflections from organisers past and present (including many of the OG crew!) and of course well-deserved celebrations--maybe even with cake! 🎂
pydata.bsky.social
Our PyData London Meetup chapter is about to celebrate its 100th meetup tomorrow! 💯

We’re beyond proud to see how far our community has come, and can’t wait to hear all about this milestone event! Congrats to our fabulous PyData London Meetup chapter! 🥳
PyData London - 100th Meetup, Tue, Oct 7, 2025, 7:00 PM | Meetup
**Venue**: Riverbank House, 2 Swan Ln, London EC4R 3AD **Please note**: 1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. 🚨🚨🚨 2. This event follows the **[Nu
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pydatalondon.bsky.social
Python: The Documentary | An origin story

What began as a side project in the 1990s now powers AI, data science and some of the world's biggest companies. But Python almost disappeared at one point.

Featuring Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more!

youtu.be/GfH4QL4VqJ0?...
Python: The Documentary | An origin story
YouTube video by CultRepo
youtu.be
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Craig's slides on breaking blackbox evals for AI agents

github.com/Python-Test-...
github.com
Reposted by PyData London
gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social
Skrub: machine-learning with dataframes

Presentation at @pydatalondon.bsky.social, discussing how skrub facilitates data transformations & wrangling on dataframes for machine learning
and introducing the exciting "DataOps" to tune and re-apply any wrangling code
speakerdeck.com/gaelvaroquau...
Skrub: machine-learning with dataframes
While data-science talks a lot about machine learning, much of the work is preparing and assembling dataframes. Such work is very manual. Here I introdu…
speakerdeck.com
pydatalondon.bsky.social
You don’t need a degree to get into data science: apprenticeships are also great.

And there are many benefits. Empowered and loyal, apprentices drive plenty of fresh thinking with real world impact: 87% of employers say apprentices boost team innovation.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Last but definitely not least we have Ruby Waller on Apprenticeships in Data: a practical pathway into the profession.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
There are many unresolved problems with agents.

Context engineering helps. Designing the entire informational environment not just the prompt so the model can "plausibly" complete the task.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Our first lightning talk from Imamuddin Shaik on Reliable Agents: Context Engineering, Roles, and What 1M-Token Windows Don’t Fix.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
One surprisingly effective way to evaluate outputs is using an LLM as a judge.

Observability is key. Focus on process not tools.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Why use evals?

Ensure TRUST and CAPABILITIES of our AGENTS so that somebody will pay for them.
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Next up we have Craig West on Breaking the Black Box — evaluating AI agents!
pydatalondon.bsky.social
It looks like a date frame, but Skrub stores the whole transformation pipeline in the magic skb attribute!
pydatalondon.bsky.social
@skrub-data.bsky.social DataOps lets you wrap your pandas (or other!) data wrangling code as sklearn transforms that can now be transferred to production.

And we can also cross validate and optimise our data wrangling!
pydatalondon.bsky.social
@skrub-data.bsky.social’s text encoders find latent categories for you. It has several different text encoders depending on accuracy / fit time trade off you want. Or it will choose the best for you!
pydatalondon.bsky.social
Our first talk tonight is from @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social on @skrub-data.bsky.social.

Real tables are too messy for sklearn - skrub preprocesses them for you.