My Python Meetup Experience

Learning more about Python

I attended “An Evening of Python Coding” hosted by The Austin Python Group on November 15. This event was held online.

The focus of the event that I attended was demoing “PyLint”, which markets itself as a “static code analyser”. The guy who created PyLint was on video call from Israel, so it was really late his time for his presentation.

One of the slides shown in this presentation was the Static Analysis Methods of PyLint visualized by an abstract source tree, referred to as and AST in this demo. I appreciated seeing how the program works and the data structures that it uses mapped out visually. This was my first exposure to an AST, so I’m curious to see if I’ll come across more as I dig into Python more. The AST helped me understand how the data was taken in, so I’m guessing that ASTs are common in software packages.

The word “jit” was thrown around a lot, and I think PyLint is a jit. Upon a quick google search, I learned that stands for “just-in-time compiler”, so it explains how this code is processed a bit more.

A quote I pulled from the talk is:

“Hidden blocks in linters for better and more secure code”

I had to look up what a linter is as well, and it sounds like it’s a basic debugging software. Based on this quote, I believe PyLint is a compiler focused on finding security bugs in the program one is writing.

Would I go to another meetup?

Absolutely! I would want to have a bigger project that I’m working on than what I had when I attended this one. There was time for questions and code help at the end, but I hadn’t started my final project at the time of attending. I also think experience using IDEs or a desktop compiler would help me understand the technology aspect of Python more.

This specific experience was a little overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. I was a little lost most of the time on the technical aspect of it, hence the overwhelm. However, it was online and the other participants didn’t seem particularly enthused, so that was a little underwhelming.

I lived in Chicago for a while, and would attend meetups when I was up there for UX. I really enjoyed going to those in person to see different office spaces and network with more experienced people. Having a professional network outside of the company one works for helps with seeing solutions to problems in a new light as well as providing a network when the time to switch jobs comes.