Today, I went to one of Tripython’s meetups in the Renaissance Computing Institute’s (RENCI) campus (which is reasonably isolated from main campus in my opinion). Judging from all the attendees’ summaries about themselves, there were a number of backgrounds of people who were interested in attending: the tech professionals from companies like IBM, the researchers (at least two were biology), and hobbyists. Several members also were carryovers from Pyladies. So overall, a wider range of backgrounds than I initially expected.

After all of the announcements, we were allowed to work on whatever projects we were interested on working on. The room was open to any and all discussion/questions, and was nice to work in. I worked on both the final project (where I was attempting to open the file and see how it opened/was formatted), as well as some computer networking things with Python that I’ve been looking at recently. I figured that I would work on the final project in an IDE like Pycharm until I knew how to properly set Cloud 9 up (incidentally, the RENCI folks also know that we tinker with Cloud 9). I’ve been running the other project on a Linux virtual machine, so a little bit less exposure there.

I’ve never attended a programming meetup prior to this, but it seems like something that is very useful if you are doing a lot of Python for either free time or work. It seems like they have a pretty cool group here, however, and they are currently planning for the PyData Carolinas Conference happening this upcoming September 14-16th. The group seems to be pretty receptive to anyone interested in presenting something, so if you are, you can definitely find more at http://pydata.org/carolinas2016/ . I most likely won’t be in the area to attend it, but I’ll definitely keep an eye out for a Python group where I’m going for grad school.