This past weekend saw me attending PyCon AU, in Brisbane, for the very first time. It was a truly great experience and I was struck by how welcoming the Python community was. Aside from learning lots I met some really great Pythonistas and I am looking forward to my next opportunity to attend one of these events.

I was fortunate to be giving a talk at Pycon AU entitled Graphs, Networks and Python: The Power of Interconnection. As the title suggests my talk was on graphs and networks, particularly the fantastic NetworkX library. Graphs and network structures are fascinating. From two atomic elements; namely nodes and edges, it is possible to create a rich structure that accurately describes social, biological and technological networks that impact us on a daily basis. The beauty of graphs is that they are easy to understand but provide us the tools to gain deep insights in a variety of domains.

Slides from my talk are available here (Graphs, Networks and Python). After my talk I was asked a number of questions about front end visualisation libraries, a number of which I couldn’t remember at the time. Two libraries that I should have mentioned are Sigma.js and vis.js but a simple web search will, for better or worse, unearth lots more choices.

Finally, if graphs and networks interest you I would encourage you to check out Graph Theory @ Wikipedia or one of the more thorough textbooks on the subject that are listed there. Happy network-ing.