I went to a meetup called “People Programming” in Durham on Sunday, June 4th. I’ve previously been to hack night meetups, but this was very different. People programming included 6 people meeting in a coffee shop and was very informal. Two of the people who came, and knew each other, both brought books on a certain programming language that they were trying to learn. But for the most part we all just chatted about what coding languages we know and the types of meetup and networking opportunities that exist in the Triangle and what specific skills are needed for different tech positions (like user experience designer, programmer, etc). I did talk specifically about python coding with one person(who I actually went to college with and vaguely remember playing in the university band with) and I showed her some of the trinkets I was working on. At that point, I was working on my drawing app and trying to avoid getting help from anyone else, but if I had needed it she definitely would have helped me trouble shoot my code.

Prior to moving the NC this spring, I lived in Chicago and regularly went to a civic hacking event called Chi Hack Night (the group has a sister event in Durham that I would like to go to in the future), which was very different from this event. Chi Hack Night usually had more than 150 people, an invited speaker, and multiple work groups or classes after the speaker presented. The goal of these hack night groups is to use public/civic data to make people lives better when interacting with the government. For example, they created a web-app to figure out where your towed car was and who to contact about it, or aggregated and cleaned voter-related data to help underdog political candidates.

Having now been to two very different types of events, I understand when to use each of these. The hack night is more project focused and serial, while the people programming was very informal and could have a different vibe from meeting to meeting. If I was coding something myself and needed the help of someone else’s eyes, the people programming type event would be extremely helpful, though I could probably find someone to help troubleshoot at a hack night event. As a statistical analyst, I feel like I’m already halfway into the tech door and recognize these events to be great networking and provide information for different types of opportunities.