On June 11th, I visited the Splat Space in Durham for their Software Project Night. I figured it would be a good place to sit down, work on the app I’m developing, ask for feedback on issues I ran into, and give feedback to other developers. It turned out that I was the only one in attendance besides the organizers of the event, and they were not really web developers, so working on my app around them didn’t offer me too much more benefit than working alone. I decided to show them a project that I created a couple of years ago called bytecrank.com and get feedback from them about the user interface instead. We ended up doing more talking about the organizers’ past experiences and preferred programming languages than we did about my project’s user interface. But I was able to get some useful suggestions from them. Firstly, the source code of my WYSIWYG editors should be readonly, because people might expect to be able to edit that and have the live preview respond accordingly. Secondly, it is not readily apparent that the “image viewer” WYSIWYG editor only allows an image that already exists to be clicked and viewed larger, instead of creating the entire gallery. Thirdly, when using the live preview HTML editor, it could be useful to have the preview pop out in a separate window and keep just the code in the original window, so the user could drag the preview to an external monitor. This is all great feedback that I’d love to take into consideration when updating the site. I did not receive any feedback about the bytecrank filebox, which allows the user to host files in custom directories on my server for free, but I did have them look at it. I believe they thought that part of the site was well polished, so I will leave it as it is for now. I certainly gained useful insight from attending this event, but most of our time was spent discussing which languages the organizers preferred over other languages, so I am not sure that I would revisit this particular meet up location. That being said, I am very grateful for their welcoming attitude, conversation, and feedback. I would consider visiting a professional meet up community in the future to gain UI and debugging insight, because the feedback people can give you is very valuable. All said and done, I spent a couple hours there and left with some useful feedback to work on.