Welcome!<\/p>\n
We here on the Python team at Microsoft are starting a blog. And since this is the first post, we wanted to give a bit of an introduction of who we are, what we do, and what this blog is for.<\/p>\n
Yes, we do! We are part of the Data Group in Azure, the same group that brings you SQL Server<\/a>, Azure ML Studio<\/a> and Cortana Analytics Suite<\/a>. Python is obviously a big part of data science these days, and so it’s great for us to be located so close to the teams that are really advancing the field.<\/p>\n You may have already seen Jupyter Notebooks in Azure ML Studio<\/a> and the Cortana Analytics Gallery<\/a> – that was us. We’ve also collaborated with other teams to bring the Azure ML data access SDK<\/a> for Python, so you can programmatically bring your data sets in and out of Azure ML Studio.<\/p>\n Besides our data-focused work, we also work with the Visual Studio team to provide Python support<\/a> through Python Tools for Visual Studio<\/a>, which you can get in any of the free (or paid) versions of Visual Studio 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n We also help out other teams at Microsoft to improve their Python support, so you can use Python in Azure App Service<\/a>, for Application Insights<\/a>, Windows IoT<\/a>, or to manage all of your Azure services with the cross-platform Azure SDK for Python<\/a>.<\/p>\n And we work with groups in the community, whether that’s sponsoring the Jupyter\/IPython project<\/a>, hosting PyLadies events<\/a>, supporting PyCon US<\/a> or hosting PyData Seattle<\/a> in our conference center.<\/p>\n Because we have so much to tell you! Obviously we want to have our own home to announce product releases and updates, but there’s so much more.<\/p>\n As part of, ahem, “testing our products”, sometimes our engineers write cool side-projects. So if you want to play with speech recognition and natural language processing in Python, you can grab the Project Oxford<\/a> package we wrote for a demo. Work with Excel a lot? You may find PyVot<\/a> interesting. Or if you have a Kinect, you can use our PyKinect2<\/a> libraries with them. These are not official products and they are basically unsupported, but they’re out there for sharing (by the way – they’re all on GitHub if you’d like to help flesh them out).<\/p>\n We also get to speak at various conferences, mostly about Python, and sometimes we just make short training videos<\/a>. How else are you going to find these if you’re not following our blog?<\/p>\n Some members of our team are also CPython<\/a> core developers, and may have reputations for being snarky Canadians<\/a>. I’m sure they have interesting things to discuss, but we’ll tag them with a “snark” warning so you can choose whether to read them or not.<\/p>\n Finally, we want to capture Python engineering stories. We’ll be going around Microsoft to the teams that are using Python for awesome stuff<\/a>, but we’d also love to share customer stories (with permission, obviously). So if you’ve<\/i> done something awesome with Python, Azure, Visual Studio, or Azure ML and want to brag about it, email us at python@microsoft.com<\/a> and suggest it. We can’t promise to publish everything, but we’d love to hear about it regardless.<\/p>\n Over to the right of this page (or at the bottom if you’re on a small screen) is our RSS feed. You can also follow @pt4vs<\/a> on Twitter to get notifications whenever we post something new.<\/p>\nWhy do you need a blog?<\/h2>\n
How can I keep up to date?<\/h2>\n