Over the previous weekend I attended a meetup of the RTP Python meetup group. The group meets weekly at a local coffee shop in Durham (actually, they meet at my favorite coffee shop, Bean Trader’s, which made me a bit more at ease because at least I was in a familiar environment.) The structure was very informal. I gathered that one young man, who works as Cisco, organized the group because he found himself being the reference guy for Python at work, and he thought he could make himself available regularly to answer others’ questions about Python.

The topic of this meetup was specificially Test Driven Development. I learned that test driven development is when the tests for a program are written first, as check-points. It is a given that when first written, all the tests will fail. Then, as you or your project group gradually writes up the code, one by one the tests will be satisfied. If you wrote a comprehensive set of tests, then when all the tests are satisfied, that should mark the completion of your project. To demonstrate test driven development, the organizer chose to share some code he wrote for his work at Cisco, and talk us through it. To coordinate the meeting, we had the option to use Slack or Discord. Both are proprietary team collaboration software tools (Discord was originally designed for the gaming community). I was not familiar with Slack or Discord so I was exposed to new software tools to use to collaborate on teams. Once on either of these tools, the organizer used Google Hangouts to share his the code on his screen with the rest of us (I am familiar with Google Hangsouts and use it myself for team projects).

I personally felt that the organizer made a lot of assumptions about the attendee’s knowledge of Python. At the beginning we had gone around the table and introduced ourselves, including our level of understanding of Python. Most attendees were new to Python, or somewhat new. Two of my classmates, Maddy and Rachel Anne, were also attending this meetup with me. However, despite the fact that his audience was mostly of beginner proficiency, the organizer didn’t give us a lot of background and instead dove into his code. For example, I picked up more than halfway through the allotted time that he was working in Django, which I had heard of before, but had to look up. Django is a free and open-source web framework that’s written in Python. The primary use of Django is to create complex, data-driven websites. Once I was clued in that we were using the built-in test tools of Django, I was able to understand a lot more of the presentation. We also discussed Unittest, which is a Python module that provides a wide range of tools for constructing and running tests. I was easily able to find the unittest documentation on the Python Software Foundation’s site, which made it WAY easier to follow along. I feel that I understood much more about unittest than I did about Django’s built-in test tools.

I essentially spent most of the presentation Googling the terms that were thrown around that I did not understand. While at first, I felt lost and isolated by the level of discourse in the meeting, I did my best to change my attitude and decide this was a great way to get exposed to new topics relevant to Python. I got to look at some Django code, and I think that unittest will be really helpful to me in the future if I do decide to try the test driven development method to my coding. After the main topic of test-driven development, there was an open Q&A. I had some confusion on what tuples were, since we haven’t yet used them in class, and I got a pretty good answer: tuples are immutable lists. That makes sense! Another attendee asked about itertools, and it turned out to be useful as itertools have come up as I work on my Final Project for this class.

This meetup was a little discouraging at first, but I won’t let it deter me from seeking out other Python meetups. From reading my classmates’ reflections on their meetups, I think it would be beneficial for me to seek out meetups that are more organized, with am invited presenter with a formal presentation on a topic. And/or, I have seen that meetups like Triangle Python User Group (formerly Trizpug) have open project nights throughout the Triangle area, and that may be a fun community resource to go to after I finish this class. I do want to use meetups as a way to continue learning about Python even after I finish this course. I also hope to find a community to inspire me to continue studying Python. I’d especially like to meet other women who are interested in Python and/or are using Python in their daily jobs.