PyCon Meetup and visiting Lahore!

While browsing through my daily feed I came across this TechJuice article on an upcoming Python Pakistan conference. Being a Python fan, I just couldn't pass on the opportunity and as the call for proposals was open, I submitted a proposal for a workshop. The proposal is about Programming Robots with Python! Combining my love for robotics and my liking for Python, I thought to myself why not! 

At LearnOBots my EdTech company we have developed a cost effective programmable mobile robot for kids. We use Arduino with a graphical programming environment to teach kids how to program the robot. For PyCon I thought we could easily replace the Arduino with a Raspberry PI and start programming the robot to do cool stuff like making line following and obstacle avoidance robots, delivery robots for Warehouses etc.

So at the start of last week I received a call from the PyCon organizers that they were organizing their 3rd meetup in Lahore on Friday (Sept 8th) and asked if I would like to attend. I thought why not, summer is just about over, Fall semester is about to start, I know I would get really busy with my teaching so let's just visit Lahore on the weekend. Turns out the meet-up was mostly to discuss the organizational issues along with setting up committees to look after the conference. It started off with Badar Khushnood (of Google / Twitter) and Khurram Zafar (of LUMS Center for Entrepreneurship) sharing their experiences of organizing conferences. The proposals were also discussed and I got to express the need for my proposal. Although it still hasn't been accepted but it was cool to discuss something totally different. I was the only one talking about playing with hardware using Python. The call for proposals is still open, so if you are interested you'd better submit one right now! 

All in all I've had a good weekend trip to Lahore, met some cool people and my wife spent around 5 hours at Lahore's Liberty market trying to order Jora's for her cousin's upcoming wedding! By the way I'm assuming 5 hours as it's around 4 and a half hours already and I'm blogging from Liberty Market right now! I'm assuming she would be back in 30 mins! Here are some pictures that I took for contributing to Google Maps. These are of the recently opened Packages Mall.