On April 24th I went to my second People Programming at Francesca’s Café in Durham, NC. Here’s the link for the meetup: http://www.meetup.com/trianglehackerhours/ In contrast to my first visit to this meetup, this one was a lot more enriching. Not to rewrite my first meetup report, but during my first experience with People Programming, I didn’t really interact with many programmers outside of the ones that came in from our class. This one was much different.
As before, I had showed up early, but so had Hannah Wang and Natalia Lopez from class. So we basically got ourselves a table and began working on our projects. Auspiciously people who also were attending the People Programming leader, including one of the guys who runs the People Programming meetup, Aaron Knight, happened to sit at a table next to us.
After laughing at the coincidence we all introduced ourselves to each other and told each other what we were working on. What surprised me the most was that for most of the people at the Python meetup, Python was not their first language. Aaron Knight, who I think described himself as a software engineer, was currently working on a program in JavaScript, despite attending the Python meetup.
Outside of meeting other programmers and getting to talk to them about their experiences, Aaron Knight also helped me solve a critical problem in my program. For my Final Project, I had wanted to enable the user to search a campaign finance .csv file for a certain candidate’s name. However, I wanted that user to find any name they wanted, regardless of whether or not they typed in the candidate’s last name, first name, or any combination of a candidate’s name elements. Luckily all of the names in the .csv file were of the same formatted (LAST NAME, FIRST NAME, MIDDLE NAME), but the obstacle I had was matching a user’s query if their query didn’t fit this exact format.
I didn’t want to just print out some cumbersome instruction to input it a certain way, I wanted to do it Pythonically (not sure if that’s a word). For a while I was stuck, and I brought my idea to Aaron, who ultimately suggested that I split each person’s name by either a space or a comma, and then compare each name element to the candidate names in my .csv file to see if they matched the user’s query.
Ultimately this was one or two lines of code but it really made my program run a lot better, and it really showed me the benefit of Python meetups. Honestly, once this semester ends I doubt I’ll attend this meetup anytime soon (since I won’t necessarily be working on any Python programs), but when I undoubtedly do cross paths with Python again, I will definitely see this meetup as a resource.