The first meetup that I attended was TriPython’s Durham Project Night that was hosted by the Caktus Group in Durham, NC. It took place on Monday, March 21, 2016 at 6pm.

Prior to attending this project night, I did not really know what to expect, since I had never really considered myself a serious enough programmer to be able to attend one of these events. I had my expectations built up as everyone who was there as serious programmers who were already a tight knit community.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it went! A few other classmates were also there, which was nice, but even without them there, I feel like I would have had a good time. The programmers who were there were at variety of levels and knew a variety of languages, which was really fascinating. Two of the people that I talked to there were both students who had recently graduated from N.C. State and were in professional programming jobs. You could tell what a nice community it was, since they wanted to continue programming even after doing it all day for work!

In fact, a lot of the people at this programming meetup did do some sort of information technology or programming for a living. I found this particularly interesting and wondered what percentage of programmers are those that do it for a hobby as compared to the number of those who do it professionally; the majority of the people at this meetup seemed to do a bit of both.

There was no particular theme for this meetup, since it was an event dedicated to general project hours and help. Since this was the day after Spring Break, there weren’t any assignments to work on really, but I did try my hand at the extra credit spring break hacks. Although I wasn’t successful in completing the extra credit assignment (I chose the one that involved cloning our class website) just being able to talk it out and learn about Cloud9 from the other people there was a good experience. I found that I was actually able to converse in an informed way about programming, which was a bit surprising to myself, since it proved that I knew more about programming than I thought I did.

Thinking back on this event, I would say that I would go to something like this again. It was a truly supportive and welcoming atmosphere, and you don’t have to be the best or most knowledgeable about programming to attend. It’s a great environment to test a technique you’ve been struggling with or learn something new from the other people there.