My expectations prior to the meetup:

I have no idea how something like this will be structured. It is a virtual meetup and this session is referred to as “Lightning Learning”. It is an hour and a half hosted by Women Who Code Austin. This is a Public Group of 6533 members (I am technically a member now) and about 45 people have RSVPed. I expect a small group of 7-14 people, consisting mostly of women from the Austin area. I anticipate various languages will be discussed because I was prompted to input what language I am interested in upon RSVPing to the invitation.

From the meetup invite:

Lightning talks will be 5-15 min on any topic pertaining to programming, technology, or your experience as a woman in technology. Prior to the talk there were 7 speakers on the following topics:

• javascript modules
• From DevOps to HumanOps
• Creating Progressive Web Apps using PyScript and Atri
• Importance of understanding analytics data collection basics as a developer
• Lessons learnt while creating a new full-stack web development framework on top of React
• Things I learned about accessibility
• Expectations!

How it played out and what I learned:

There was an attendance of about 13 people, though attendance cycled throughout the meeting. I did not love it, but my reflection is on this specific event and not on coder meetups in general.
The moderators could have been better at maintaining the flow, there was a long awkward pause before moving on to the next person. It was a little slow for a “lightning learning” session. One of the hosts looked really uninterested. One participant held the floor a little too much. The format of the session was not maintained, however, the most experienced people talked about their preferences regarding their favorite languages. The various languages all have the similar key concepts (for loops, try/except, functions, conditions, etc). The verdict was that Java is not “beginner friendly” because it’s robust, but it is necessary to learn for some. They suggested just learning what you think you are actually going to use.

The first presenter was a woman named Tammy who shared about accessibility. Her presentation covered what to keep in mind while coding and tools to test your product in order to assess the level of conformance with WCAG standards. She focused mostly on mobile software development specifically for vision impairments that might require screen readers. She explained the four principles of accessibility which are perceivability, operability, understandability, robustness. Tammy demonstrated testing tools for color contrast, screen readers like Google Lighthouse and WAVE. I will say it was a little awkward for her to assess the Women Who Code Austin’s webpage as an example. It felt a bit like she put them on the spot. Overall, it was interesting and provided information that I would use again.

The second presenter was one of the hosts, CC, who walked through how to deal with exceptions. I wish that she defined exceptions a bit more and provided an example before breaking down how to deal with them. I am understanding it to be dealing with an error(?). When working through problems it is important to think “what are we trying to accomplish?” Next ask, “how bad is the issue?” and “What’s the best we can do?” She discussed some of the following solution strategies:

• raise Exception (’Error Message’)
• post an under construction message, to let ppl know to come back later
• is just the favicon down? who cares. go to sleep.
• try (what may go wrong), catch (try your best)
• do not then try to except raise error again, or pass.
• DO THIS! try: do_something() except log.error(e)
• getting an actual error message is better than a null. Do not return None, it’s not helpful

At one point, CC showed how one error message looks in several languages. That was a nice glimpse into how code issues and conversation cross over multiple code languages. A new term introduced during meetup was “stacktrace” which appartently refers to code containing information about the call stack and points out where things have gone wrong. Similarly, a new concept mentioned in the meetup was “logging”, I am not sure exactly what it means but from context clues, I’d say it’s a form of record keeping. I also learned that VBA code exists for Excel which I might find helpful in the future.

Future event and group involvment:

No, but only because I don’t plan on coding regularly. I am acquiring this knowledge as a foundation of understanding how a machine thinks. I will likely pursue digital preservation and I anticipate occasional command-line interactions and the need for conversations involving code concepts at times. Additionally, I have always felt like coding is a special level that some people have unlocked and I wanted to try it. It’s similar to when I got a personal training certification instead of hiring a personal trainer. I wanted to see what they knew that was so valuable (shockingly less than you’d think to reach certification). So basically, I was interested in demystifying the science of learning computer languages. Something I never hear anyone talk about is SQL, probably because it has a very specific purpose to work with databases, but I really enjoyed learning the basics of that this summer.

I see myself becoming a part of a group that is more archive based, rather than computer language based. My focus is preservation which involves organizing information which can incorporate coded elements, however, code is not central. Working in digital preservation also demands many IT encounters, studying computer languages will assist in communication with technology focused individuals. I never know what kind of repository back end I’ll be dealing with in the future, part of that process may require python to bag the images and metadata.