Skip to content

Contributing

Here the process of creating a talk is detailed - from the talk's inception to the final presentation. Anyone can contribute at any point along the way - no matter if you're giving the talk or not! Use the table of contents to navigate the different stages.

Note

Just want to share a great, "scientist first" resource with colleagues? You can add it to our Resources page!

Proposing a talk

Do you have a step in your software workflow that could be improved with the right tool? Or maybe you often find yourself thinking, "There has to be a better way to do this!" If so, share your thoughts by opening an issue on GitHub or posting in Teams (or reach out directly to the Python for Lunch organiser). Describe your workflow, the challenges you’re facing, and any ideas you have - we’d love to discuss and explore potential solutions!

Post a GitHub issue Discuss in Teams

Writing and giving the talk

So you've chosen a topic that you're interested in and want to write a talk? That's great!

Note

You don't need to be experienced in the topic to give the talk! In fact, you can provide a unique perspective as someone just learning. While learning the topic and writing the talk, organisers will be able to provide suggestions, recommendations, and links to materials to help guide you.

Style of talk

There is no rigid requirements for the style of the talk (well, besides the time limit). But while writing the talk, its important to consider the following:

  • Sell your audience on the topic: A lot of these tools can seem quite abstract from the get-go, and it can be difficult to see why one should care about the tool in one's work. Starting your talk with a motivating example goes a long way. Show them something that was really hard (or even impossible) to do before, but is now made easy. Show them early on why they should care, and then go on once they've taken the bait.
  • Don't re-invent the wheel: There are already awesome freely available resources (e.g., documentation/tutorials from the tool of interest, learning resources geared specifically towards researchers, etc.) surrounding many of these topics. See if you can integrate your talk with these existing resources - for example, by linking out to the resource, or by following along a tutorial for a part of your talk. Not only does it reduce your burden of writing the talk completely from scratch, but it familiarises attendees with new resources they can learn more from, and we can gain from relying on high quality and constantly updated tutorials. You can provide an overview of the essentials and how its impacted your work, and leave it up to the extra resources to provide a fuller picture. See the Extra resources page for inspiration, or talk to your peers.

Technical requirements for the talk

Note

Using a single Jupyter Notebook for your talk contents is preffered due to ease of integration into the website. But if you don't want to for any reason (perhaps you want some more artistic flair), we can be more flexible as shown below.

If you'd like to write notes or code for the talk, please write them as either a Jupyter Notebook or a Markdown document.

If you have supporting slides for the talk, you can provide them in PDF format so they can be displayed in the website. Powerpoint and Keynote would need to be converted to PDF for the website.

If you're running Python code, be sure to note in the Notebook which Python packages you're using so others can reproduce.

Finishing up

Once you’ve prepared your talk materials, share them with an organizer for review. We can go through the feedback together in person, or if you’re comfortable with Git and GitHub, you can submit a pull request to the main branch. This allows for direct comments and collaborative revisions, ensuring a smooth and interactive review process!

Once the talk material is finalised, it will be added to the website.