Cultural Immersion Meetup

For our cultural immersion meetup, I attended the online meeting, ‘An Evening of Python Coding’ hosted by the Austin Python Group Meetup. It was hosted on the meetup website on November 15th. From what I was able to understand from the meeting, this meeting was intended to bring together two groups of Python enthusiasts, one Austin based and one DC based, although as the night went on it was clear that this was an international affair.

I joined the chat a little early at 6:00 PM and I was with the host Jacob for a bit. He was very kind and excited to see people joining. Before the chat started, Jacob began to explain a little bit about how the talk will go. One thing that jumped out to me was that he kept repeating that he knows there are people know to Python and that this group is welcoming to those people. “We always try to have something for everyone,” he said in reference to the viewers asking some related python questions. During this period before the talk began, Jacob encouraged the early viewers jump in and discuss what they find interesting with python before the chat began. On person, Pradip, had a questioned related to scraping data from a website with a python related tool and another Luis mentioned that it was his first time returning to Python in a long while, but he had been coding since Python 3. When addressing both these people, I really appreciated that Jacob kept trying to make sure that their questions and topics were explained in an very relatable way. And I certain wasn’t alone in being unsure and new to the coding scene, there were a few others who had recently changed over to programing from their previous health care jobs (I can not recall their name unfortunately), but it was nice to know I wasn’t alone in feeling unsure. Ja

I have been struggling greatly in this class and I have become almost certain I will not be doing anything related to programing or GitHub in the future. And while that is upsetting, I found it really comforting to see people in this community be opening and understanding to people who are new to python.

It took a bit longer than was expected but eventually the speaker for the evening Gabriel came on to talk. Apparently, he was joining in from Israel at about 4AM, which I mean, that’s dedication if you ask me. The topic to be discussed was a Python tool called Pylint. According to Gabriel, Pylink is “one of the tools to do static analysis on Python.” Having chosen data analysis for my final project, I thought perhaps this could be a useful tool to revisit, but as the conference went on, I think it became clear to me that it was a tool likely well beyond the scope of what is needed for our final. Still, the talk went on for an hour. As I struggle with Python (and the connection was honestly pretty bad), I think I kind of lost most of the meaning behind it, but if I understood correctly, Pylink was a tool that basically added feedback to you while you coded and offer ways to fix issues with your code. In my notes I make a comparison like it would open a dictonary of terms/code or something for you to read through. It was a little difficult for me, I learn best when following along with my own program. This was more of a lecture and less hands on. Still, it was really interesting and apparently its very easy to load into programs so perhaps something I should look into if I do pursue this further.

The talk ran for about an hour after which Gabriel took some questions. But after that, Jacob opened the floor to the rest of the viewers. Apparently after the talk, this is when people come forward with their own Python issues for the group to work through. One gentleman, Prapid, had an issue with scraping data using a program called Beautiful Soup. The discussion went on for a long, long time, the talk officially ended at 7:30, but this help session ran till about 11PM. The biggest surprise to me was just how often others would jump in to help Prapid. Jacob spent a long time walking him through explaining how to describe his code so he could follow along, asking him to go line by line slowly so everyone could follow. One viewer jumped in, Matt, recommended trying cloudflare as a better option to Beautiful Soup. Other users also helped, Yusuf asked for the site Prapid needed to scrape from so he could check it out for help and Bill brought up how it looked like the scraping code was missing options inside the nested options? Granted, I had no idea what they were talking about, but as someone who has always seen coding as a solo act, this was a real site to see. Finally, Graham who had used Beautiful Soup in the past stepped up and began to walk Prapid through the issues he was dealing with. Jacob was so impressed, he reached out to Graham for him to give a talk in February, which I thought was really cool.

This class has really made me sure I can’t program. I had hoped to learn more about command lines tools honestly, so overall I’ve been a little let down, like I just wasn’t good enough to get anything. But this experience did at least show me that this community is not quiet and isolated, the people in Python are friendly and willing to help. They literally spent an extra three hours helping after the chat, and that was only when I had to leave! They were still going at 11! I may not become a coder, but as an avid gamer and lover of computers, I am a consumer. I may not fully understand what was discussed, but this experience helped make me think more critically about how I can actually interact with the coding community. I felt welcomed and, while I was intimidated with my lack of knowledge, Jacob, Gabriel and the rest of the speakers made me feel like I belonged in the space. I only wish I got it myself.