About Python Charmers
We began operations in 2009. We design and deliver technical Python training for companies and government organisations. We develop our own course material and tailor it to each client.
We have now trained over 7,000 people through over 700 courses across Australia, New Zealand, South-East Asia, USA, and Europe. Our trainers have experience in technical training, and in industry and academia.
We specialise in Python. We teach how the language works and why it was designed that way, not only the syntax.
Participants rate our trainers highly. Across 1,036 feedback responses, 99.5% agreed their trainer had a firm grasp of the content, 99.1% that they explained it simply, and 99.5% that they answered questions well.
Our principal trainers come from research and academia. They can explain a concept in plain English, and explain it again from a different angle when the first explanation does not land.
We teach beginners through to expert programmers, including people who have never written code. Every course has exercises throughout the day. By the end of *Introduction to Python*, participants have written a full dashboard.
Our expertise
We teach Python programming, data science, machine learning and AI. Our trainers use these tools in their own work, and teach from that experience.
Our values
Courses are hands-on and run in small classes, so each participant gets the trainer's attention. We teach skills you can apply at work straight away.
Our mission
To give professionals and their organisations the Python and AI skills their work calls for, taught well enough that they keep using them.
Our clients
We have trained teams at Boeing, Cisco, Toyota and Optus, and at many Australian government agencies and universities.
Our training philosophy
Working practitioners
Your trainer uses this material in their own work, and can answer questions about applying it to yours.
Hands-on learning
You write code throughout the course, on exercises built from realistic data and problems.
Certificate of completion
Every participant receives a certificate of completion for the course.
Ongoing support
Post-course support and resources, for when you are back at your desk and applying what you learnt.
Our team
Our trainers are working professionals in Python development, data science and technical training.
Dr Ed Schofield
Founder and lead trainer
Ed is the founder of Python Charmers in Australia and Singapore. He has trained over 7,000 people in data science with Python, from dozens of organisations including Atlassian, Barclays, Cisco, CSIRO, Dolby, Harvard University, IMC, Singtel Optus, Oracle, Shell, Telstra, Toyota, Verizon and Westpac. In the Python community he is known as a former release manager of SciPy and the author of the widely used future package. He organises the Python user group in Melbourne, and speaks at Python and data science conferences around the world.
Ed holds a PhD in machine learning from Imperial College London. He also holds BA and MA (Hons) degrees in mathematics and computer science from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He has more than 20 years of experience in programming, teaching and public speaking.
Robert Layton
Senior trainer
Robert is the author of Data Mining with Python, published by Packt in 2016. He provides analysis, consultancy, research and development work to businesses, mostly in Python. He has worked with the government, financial and security sectors, in both consulting and academic roles. Before joining Python Charmers, he was a Research Fellow at the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, Federation University Australia, investigating cybercrime analytics and data-mining algorithms for attribution and profiling.
Robert is a contributor to scikit-learn, the open source machine learning library for Python, and writes regularly on data mining for several outlets. He wrote the website learningtensorflow.com and sold it to Databricks in 2017. He has presented at international conferences on Python, data analytics and their applications.
Henry Walshaw
Senior trainer and GIS expert
Henry has 16 years of experience in GIS, spatial analysis and application development, mostly in natural resource management. His core expertise is developing and analysing large spatial datasets, mainly in Python. He is also practised at explaining that work to subject matter experts and the general public.
Henry has worked in federal and state government, at Geoscience Australia, the Victorian Government Department of Sustainability and Environment, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In the private sector he has worked as a consultant, a manager, and CTO of a startup. He is currently a senior developer at FloodMapp, an Australian company developing real-time flood alerting systems. With Python Charmers he has trained over 1,000 people, from organisations including AGL, the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, ESRI, National Australia Bank and Telstra. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computational Science.
Emeritus trainers
We thank these past trainers for their work with Python Charmers and our clients.
Dr Juan Nunez-Iglesias
Emeritus trainer
Juan is co-author of the book Elegant SciPy, published by O'Reilly Media. He is a core developer of the scikit-image library, and has contributed to many other scientific Python libraries, including SciPy, NetworkX and Matplotlib. He has taught and presented at the SciPy conference in Austin, EuroSciPy, PyCon Australia, the Advanced Scientific Programming in Python summer school, and Software Carpentry workshops.
Juan is a research fellow at Monash University, with research interests in neuroscience and biological image analysis. Outside research, he has a particular interest in renewable energy and the environment.
Juan has a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Science from the University of Melbourne. He holds an MSc in Statistics and a PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from the University of Southern California.
Errol Lloyd
Emeritus trainer
Errol's background is in computational neuroscience. He has been using Python for over a decade, to model neurological systems and for digital signal processing, data analysis and empirical research.
Before joining Python Charmers in 2020, Errol trained fellow researchers in the sciences and the humanities to solve research problems with software. He taught data and natural language analysis in Python, data visualisation, interactive dashboards with front-end JavaScript, and version control and collaboration with git and GitHub.
Errol advocates open source software and reproducible research in science, and wants to help more people use code to get their work done. He completed doctoral studies on visual processing in the brain at the University of Melbourne.
Dr Clare Sloggett
Emeritus trainer
Clare started in computational physics and moved into genomics. Her research interests include data visualisation and algorithms for genomic data, and her current focus is machine learning for clinical and genomic data. She co-organised the Python in Science and Data Miniconf at PyCon AU from 2015 to 2017. She regularly speaks at conferences and community events on genomics and on data analytics with Python and other open source tools.
Clare holds a BSc and PhD in computational physics from the University of NSW.
Bianca Gibson
Emeritus trainer
Bianca is a development team lead at Infoxchange, an Australian charity. She uses Python to build a directory that connects people in need with housing, a meal, money help, family violence support, counselling and other services. She has been using Python for over a decade, and has worked mostly in the government and not-for-profit sectors. She trained her colleagues at realestate.com.au and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in Python and development tools. She has presented three times at PyCon AU and RubyConf AU, on topics including functional programming, and an analysis of "imposter syndrome" and fostering healthy self-belief.
Bianca has an undergraduate degree in computer science from Monash University, Australia.
Dr Ned Letcher
Emeritus trainer
Ned is a data scientist and software engineer. He has helped a range of organisations with projects in machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval and data visualisation. He has been using Python for data analysis, visualisation, machine learning and web development for over 10 years. Ned contributes to the Plotly Dash library and is an active member of the Dash community.
Ned has a PhD in computational linguistics from the Natural Language Processing group at the University of Melbourne. He also has a Bachelor of Arts (philosophy and linguistics) and a Bachelor of Science with Honours (computer science). Ned regularly presents at local meetups, and organises the Melbourne Data Visualisation Meetup.
Testimonials
What participants say about our courses
The course was delivered by trainers who were extremely knowledgeable in their field. It was really good to learn from the best!
Great course. Enjoyed it and will follow up with some practical implementation of some of the work.
One of the best training courses I've been on.
Find a course
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