The second meetup that I attended was Triangle Hacker Hours at Francesca’s Dessert Café in Durham, NC. The one that I went to took place on Sunday, April 17th at 4:00pm.

Since I had attended my previous meetup event, I wasn’t as nervous about this one and was particularly excited because it was at a café! Coffee and coding, what could be a better combination? Beginners and advanced coders alike were encouraged to come, so I was looking forward to see what this event had in store.

Compared to the Caktus Group’s event that I had attended before, this event was not as social. People had already divided off into their usual groups and were hard at work when I came in. There were a good number of people from our class who were there though, so I sat with them. Also unlike the previous event, this event was not specifically dedicated to programming with Python, and the users there were working on all kinds of coding from what I saw on their computer screens.

There was no theme for this meetup, so it was more like a time for everyone to work on their projects in the same place. For this session, I worked on weeding through my final project data. From my testing the previous evening, I discovered that my file was too large for my data analysis program and needed to be significantly broken down. I was able to be pretty productive from this session. Even though I did not interact with other programmers outside of my classmates, this was a good chance to expose myself to a different kind of programming culture.

In hindsight, I wish that I had had the courage to talk to some of the people who more regularly attended these sessions just to get to know them better and learn more about their journey through programming. I liked the atmosphere of coding in a café, so if I do decide to attend again, I think that I’ll challenge myself to talk to at least one new person at the meetup.