On the evening of Wednesday, June 15, I attended a meeting of the Triangle Python Users Group, a.k.a. TriPython. The meeting was held between 6 and 9 in a very large conference room at the Renaissance Computing Institute (Renci) in Chapel Hill. I attended the meeting with Zach because I didn’t want to walk in alone. In the elevator, we met Steve, a graduate student at UNC who was attending the meeting as well. His friendly demeanor helped calm my nerves as we rode the elevator to the fifth floor. I don’t remember reading that there would be food, so I was surprised to find a bunch of pizzas and soft drinks on tables outside the room. Nice. Inside, there were about a dozen tables set up in a “U” shape with the open end facing a projection screen. Two classmates had arrived already, and several more came a few minutes later. We all sat the two ends of the U. The leader of the meeting Chris told us all we were welcome and that he’d wait about fifteen minutes to officially start the meeting. When he did start the meeting, Chris introduced himself and TriPython. Chris works at the RENCI, which is a data science institute affiliated with UNC. That explained why my laptop connected to the eduroam wifi network there. Chris told us that TriPython has been around for 15 years, and regularly holds a variety of different types of meetings in the area. This particular meeting was a “project night” where everybody brings their own projects and works on them. People can ask for help or bounce ideas off each other if they want to, but it wasn’t necessary. Then Chris had us all introduce ourselves by saying our names, where we work, and what python experience we had. While a bunch of classmates were in the meeting, about half or two thirds of the attendees were programmers from other places (although almost all had some working affiliation with UNC). Two or three people mentioned that they were working on machine learning and Zach asked them to elaborate on what that meant. They explained the concept clearly and in a non-judgmental tone. One guy reassured him that it was a good question and that everybody should feel free ask for clarification if they don’t understand any jargon. Once everybody introduced themselves we started working on our projects. Chris went around and worked with different people throughout the meeting, and different people worked in pairs. I took the opportunity to work on my code by myself. It was a comfortable environment: air conditioned, nice chairs, quiet-ish, and I made some progress on my final project. I expected the meeting to be a bit more structured and to be all middle-aged men, but the crowd was mostly younger, and there were a couple women not from our class. I wasn’t sure how welcoming they would be of a whole bunch of students from the same class coming to “their” meeting, and I imagined that they might be annoyed, but they were warm and welcoming and enjoyed sharing their knowledge with everybody else. If I continue to work on computer programming in the future, I could definitely see myself returning to these types of meetings.