Meetups

For my cultural immersion meetups, I had to very different but rewarding experiences. For my first meetup I went to Pearl Hacks. Pearl Hacks is an all-female hackathon sponsored by UNC that allows women of all skill levels to pursue their interests in technology. This was the 3rd Annual Pearl Hacks event and included hackers from all over the country. I was really surprised with the amount of people that came. The event itself was well-organized and had a lot of options to choose from. I could work on a project, go to workshops, or go to tech-talks given by the many different companies that were in attendance. Due to time constraints I was only able to go two workshops: Mobile Development (Android) and Open Source. In the mobile development workshop, much of my time was spent on downloading and installing Android Studio. This took away from me actually learning how to use it. I still have it on my laptop so maybe in the near future when I have time I can play around with it. The Open Source workshop was really helpful. It was led by a woman who works for Red Hat, one of the leading providers of open source solutions. She was able to give me tips on how to find open source projects, what to look for, and how to contribute. Some the examples she gave were foss2serve.org, Sahana Eden, Mozilla Firefox, Ovirt, Fedora, and openhatch.org. Overall, I was able to take away useful information that I could use to help me find an open source project to contribute to for this class. Here is the link to Pearl Hacks in case anyone wants to check it out next year: http://pearlhacks.com/

My second meetup was less formal and pretty chill. Myself, along with a few of my other classmates planned on attending People Programming in Durham but were unable to due to us not having a car. We tried Uber but that didn’t work. We decided to make our own People Programming type event on Franklin Street and invited a few of our friends that have programming experience. We sat in Sweet Frog and enjoyed frozen yogurt while working on our final project. We were able to talk to one another and ask questions and give advice. Because I was able to sit down with others and talk about my project idea, I was able to scale my project. I realized that some of my ideas such as extracting data myself was too long of a process and it would be better if I found a dataset that was already made. I thoroughly enjoyed the meetup and wish UNC had some sort of official organization for similar types of events. It would be beneficial for all programmers whether they’re in CS or IS.