On Sunday April 10, I attended my first Python meetup of the semester, a meetup called ‘People Programming’ that meets every Sunday at Francesca’s Dessert Café in Durham. Here’s a link to the meetup:

http://www.meetup.com/trianglehackerhours/

I had first heard about the meetup from Hannah Wang, who was in my final project group. She had put forward the idea of attending this weekly meetup to force herself to work on the final project, and I thought that was a sensible idea.

For a first meetup it was a little rough at first. I didn’t see anyone familiar and it took me over twenty minutes to figure out that the café’s WiFi password was written on the menu board behind the cashier (the password is “espresso” for it you ever want to go). On top of that, it was sort of hard to identify where the meetup was inside the café. At first I had assumed that a dead giveway for the meetup would be a huge group of people with laptops, however the entire café was filled with people on their laptops. And as far as I could tell from eavesdropping (as non creepily as I possibly could) none of them were talking about Python.

Well it turns out I had showed up early. Very early. I was the first one there.

So with no other recourse I just started to write the first lines of code of my project and also researching how to get the .csv file up on Cloud9. As I began to hammer away at this task, a few people from our class trickled in, and we all sort of formed our own group and started working on our projects. Three other programmers (that I could recognize) showed up as well, but they sort of seemed to be working on another project.

All in all it was way more laid back than I anticipated, and I didn’t really talk to any programmers that I didn’t know extensively, however I did manage to get a lot done. From here on, I think I will use this meetup to set aside time to work on my final project.