#Python Meetup Experience

##How did it go? I attended a hybrid Python meet-up conducted by the Hydpy team based in Hyderabad, India. It was supposed to be an in-person meeting, but the team was kind enough to accommodate a virtual call for those who couldn’t make it in person. It was conducted on 27th November at the Innominds office and the speakers were ‘Harsh Mittal’ and ‘Sangeetha Yamisetty’. It was interesting to attend this meeting but the beginning wasn’t as productive to me. Especially because the speakers shared their in-depth knowledge about implications and advantages of Python in Robotics and Machine Learning. A lot of the information went above my head because I couldn’t understand a lot of the technical terms that the speakers were referring to.

##What did you learn? I wasn’t able to have a lot of takeaways especially with the content shared by the speakers for reasons I mentioned above. But I did manage to connect with 2 other attendees virtually and was able to get in touch with them via Linkedin to understand how their experience has been working in the industry. Both of them work within the software teams at a well-established company and work on tasks that I couldn’t even have imagined. One person I spoke to explained how sellers on their platform update inventories and the kinds of problems that the sellers encounter and their role in troubleshooting the issues. They are also planning to build internal software to replace the external software that they have been using until now. To go in more detail, the system he’s workin gon is built to support GST/VAT laws in a country, and they’re creating a supporting software to optimise the inventory/payment mechanisms.

I was blown away by the complexity of work that is required for a task that seemingly looks straightforward and the skills required to perfom this.

I learnt that I have a long way to go to get to this level. He also mentioned that practice was the most important thing to get better. His work majorly is on the back-end part of building the software.

##Value It was good for me to understand the real-life implications of the software that I’m learning. I realised that I need to challenge myself regularly with new tasks/projects. This was also suggested by the person I spoke with. He suggested some pages on Instagram and online whose content would help me keep up the habit of practicing writing code.

##How was the experience different from my expectations I didn’t expect much going into the session. All I wanted to know what how do professionals interact and what kind of discussions they have in sessions like this since it’s the first time I’m attending something like this. Rather than being different, I have to admit that it scared me a bit looking at the complexity of the discussions. But I hope to keep going and practicing what I can. I do want to learn more.

##Could you see yourself becomming a member of a professional community like this in the future? If I’m being honest, as I already mentioned, I think I have a long way to go to become a specialist in the Python language as them. The standards are quite high. Since my specilisation in my masters in UX design, I will have to work with software developers throughtout my work. It is important for me to understand how they work and their limitations and what can be done with Python (and all programming languages by extension) to know how my work can be optimised and be more realistic.