I finally got a chance to attend a Python User Group Meetup. All thanks to my classmate Halina who introduced me to the website “meetup.com” and guided me through. I registered for the meetup and headed to the location. The meetup was organised by the Triangle Python Users Group: TriPython (formerly TriZPUG) and their website is “tripython.org”. The location was at RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute), an institute of UNC-Chapel Hill. I reached the location half an hour prior to the start of the meetup. Here’s the link to our meetup “https://www.meetup.com/tripython/events/djngmhyxjbrb/”
I was greeted by Mr. Chris Calloway, the event host and I introduced myself. As I was the first one to reach the venue, I saw Mr. Chris trying to arrange some snacks for the event and I offered to help him if there was anything to be done. As we introduced each other, Mr. Chris asked me as to how was I learning and as I explained and he instantaneously said “Oh, so Mr. Elliott Hauser is your professor”, you’re in good hands and I’m sure you’ll learn well and this brought a smile on my face.
Two others came in by around ten minutes past six and later I was happy to see two of my classmates Martin Meng and Kevin Kao join us. So, there were a total of 5 participants and 1 host. It was a small gathering of which half of us were from Mr. Elliott’s Python class. One of the participants Mr. John gave a presentation regarding a project he was working on which focused on analyzing audio samples from a PS4 game and predicting the accuracy of the type of sound in comparision to the existing samples. So, basically what I understood was that he was tryig to match the accuracy of the audio samples and let the program analyze, identify and predict the type of sound in the audio sample(ex: human voice, train, bird chirp, etc.,). Mr. John discussed about his code with Mr. Chris. Mr. John spoke about anacoonda navigator, ananconda for data science, jupyter notebook, urban sound datasets and Machine Learning.
It was really interesting to realize the possibilities to experiment with our thought process and try to build a code to bring it to a reality. Iunderstand there is a lot of hard-work that goes in to get to that point. But, I guess it’s passion that fuels the desire to be creative!
Despite the fact that we were beginners who were just a few weeks into learning Python, none of the attendees or the host made us feel out of place. Infact, everyone was ready to offer help if anyone was facing a tough time in fixing their code or to discuss new ideas of coding. I greeted the host and the attendees before I left and they encouraged me to attend future meetups.
It was really a great experience as this was my first tech meetup and we were encouraged by the host to attend the following meetups in the triangle area. I’m glad that I could attend this meetup. All in all, It was a positive experience.