My thoughts on my Coding Meetup Experience

I chose to attend the virtual Evening of Python Coding event for Austin on November 15th. I was informed this meeting was a bit different than the normal events hosted, as it combined both the Austin & DC python communities, and was focused heavily on a guest speaker talking through & demoing PyLint- a code analyser. Before I go more in depth about this experience I would like to get one of my largest thoughts about it out of the way. After attending an online python meetup, I pretty immediately identified the advantages of going to an in-person meetup as opposed to an online one. As a beginner coder attending an online meeting, at least to me, greatly reduced the benefits going to a meetup could have brought me.

I lack a lot of context about what is going on in the Python community, and frankly had a lot of difficulty following along during parts of the meeting, understanding the significance of the topics talked about, and even just giving the experience full focus, as it’s much more difficult to be truly present for an online meeting. Chances to network, find and chat with people who have similar coding experience as me, ask questions when I felt lost or had an idea I wanted to chime in with were slim to none in the online setting. The things I wanted to get out of the meeting were reduced, and I felt more like I was attending a work conference for someone else’s job. I don’t at all feel like this was the fault of the organisers, they obviously put a lot of thought into the content presented and discussed, but an online conference such as this was much more suited towards people who 1. Have been regularly attending these meetings and given more opportunities over time to develop relationships and rapport and 2. People with more coding experience and context overall.

I chose an online meeting as I work nights and have difficulty finding time to attend any type of in person meetup (clubs, social events, etc), but would love to find time in the summer to locate and start attending in person Python meetups, so that I can get a better idea of the benefits and networking/inter-relational opportunities meetings like this could have for me. As someone who has been deeply inspired by my programming experience and would like to integrate programming into both my hobby life and professional life, I think I would want to find a group of people who are either on a similar level as me that I can work with, chat with, and learn from, or a group in which I could develop deeper relationships with and find a mentor or that could provide me with outside learning opportunities as opposed to chatting about recent developments or what I as a beginner would consider more “niche” topics within the python community.

As for the content of the meeting, to be completely honest I was pretty much lost the entire time. The discussion on PyLint discussed static code analysis, security review, cross language analysis tools, and things of the like. While I am sure this program has a lot of value and is really cool, I have pretty much zero experience that would relate to this, and much of the presentation was given with the assumption listeners at the meeting had the needed context to understand the significance of PyLint. As someone who has only worked in Trinket and a bit in Renpy (a game development tool with Python as its native language), even the demo was extremely confusing as it contained commands and functions and calls that I have never run into such as “repo” or “hooks” or “arg”. The use of something called “checkers” was very prevalent and was not ever explained in a way that made full sense to me.

I felt like there was a pretty massive barrier of entry in this conversation, and the experience left me feeling a bit self-conscious because not only did I not really understand what was going on- I didn’t want to interrupt the presenter by asking questions I felt like everyone already knew the answers to, and during small group discussion I felt like I had pretty much nothing valuable to add to the conversation. Much of the terminology used was jargon that I am not yet fluent in and while it did make me want to continue growing as a programmer so I can someday participate more fully in meetings such as this one, the experience as it was with my current knowledge felt like it went completely over my head.

Overall, I do still think it was a valuable experience for me, while I don’t feel like I learned very much about what was actually discussed, I did learn how far reaching innovation and capabilities of Python can be. I want to find a group that works better for my goals and knowledge level, and continue learning as much about Python as I can. Knowing that there are groups like the one I attended makes me confident of the possibility of more beginner friendly groups for me to become a part of, and I hope in the future I can become a more knowledgeable programmer and find peers, friends, and mentors outside of school to integrate into my personal life. Programming makes me really happy, and it’s something I feel I have been missing from my life. While this group was not really a match for me, I am inspired to find one that is, and continue on this new path I have discovered for myself.