San Diego Python Monthly Meetup
For my meetup, I decided to attend the San Diego Python Monthly Meetup on 17 November
- I didn’t originally plan to attend this meetup specifically, but the first two for which I signed up were cancelled. I’m happy I got to attend this one, and it was pretty different from my expectations.
Mostly presentations
The first surprise was that this meetup mainly comprised two presentations from members of the group. I had expected it to be a bit more interactive, but it seems like they trade off between these presentation meetings and more collaborative sessions for working on projects. I think this was still a good experience, but I’d like to try a collaborative meetup in the future to see how it compares.
First talk: Jay Miller on GitHub Issues
The first presentation was by Jay Miller. He mainly discussed GitHub issues, specifically the ability to create issue templates and how to retrieve issue information using an API. I thought this presentation was interesting because he showed both the issues on GitHub and the code that he wrote in real time to make an API call that retrieved the issue title. It was nice to see him write the code for the API call as it happened because it showed how simple the process really was. I’m not sure exactly what use I would get out of the package he demonstrated, but I’ll keep it in mind in case something comes up in the future.
Second talk: Drew Arnett on the Experimental Contest Logger
The second presentation was by Drew Arnett. He’s an amateur radio enthusiast and he helped create a program in Python that allows for automating a lot of common tasks related to amateur radio contests. For example, he was able to automatically send and receive callsign information in Morse Code by pressing a button. The Morse Code he received was decoded into text, and the program even displayed information like the caller’s location based on the callsign prefix. It also used a database of known contest participants to reference the callsign in case he had connected to them before.
Not just code
Drew’s presentation really surprised me because it felt like more of a radio presentation than a Python presentation. He was demonstrating Python software, but most of the talk focused on the background of amateur radio contests and the hardware setup he used with the program. He did show off how it worked and discussed the benefits over others he had tried, but I just wasn’t expecting something like that from a Python meetup. It was cool to see how something he helped write could interface with several pieces of hardware to make a real world task much easier.
Value after class
I could see meetups being valuable beyond this class, especially if I find one that focuses on my specific interests. Something like a data science meetup would be really useful for my career in the future, but something fun for personal projects would also be nice. I have a project on the back burner that involves scraping a website for forum information and then using that to calculate the results of posted polls.
Final thoughts
Overall, I’m happy with my first meetup experience. I’m excited to see what other meetup opportunities I can find, and I’m especially interested in finding one to help me work through a couple of personal projects I’ve been working on.