Cultural Immersion Meetup

Meetup Group: Girls Coding Club (Houston)

Event: Let’s Code Together!

Location: Gather.town

Time: Saturday, November 12, 3-6 PM

This event was not at all how I had pictured it. The group has 2,815 members, and the event had 35 attendees in theory, but the actual number of people there was 7. One surprising thing, given the name of the group, was that it wasn’t all women. Another is that it was just so small! I definitely had in my head, as well, that there would be some kind of a presentation, but there was not even an agenda, we just talked about whatever came up.

Now, to introduce the attendees. There was Amanda, the organizer; Kwesi, a mystery, as their camera was off and they never talked; Kojo, who used to be an accountant; Harpreet, who used to work for an oil and gas company in a kind of data wrangling position but is out of work and was trying to figure out what skills she needs for possible career moves; Walker, a regular; and Kevin, who screen-shared so that we could all share in his love of a good Apple pen. Kevin, as an aside, does something that involves the government in San Jose, California. All he could say about that was absolutely nothing, so for all we know government agents were literally observing the entire meeting.

We talked about data science vs data engineering and platforms and languages that people use in different kinds of work. We had a long discussion of math in data science and programming. All agreed that as a programmer, only basic math skills and good sense were needed, but that in data science pre-calc, statistics/probability, and some calculus would come in handy. Bad math teachers and the threat they pose to national security were duly noted. We then moved on to Python vs R, from which I learned that Python is the right choice for me. I shared as well, asking questions but also talking a bit about Runestone Academy, Khan Academy for math, and Trinket. We talked about pandas, jupyter, and scrapy for data harvesting, analysis, and presentation in Python, all of which I need to look into further. Kevin and Walker each shared stories about very simple beginner-style programs that they had written that made a big difference, Kevin’s to the first company he worked for and Walker’s to his wife. We ended by playing a game of CodeWords.

The group meets every Saturday, so I think I might go again during this class if it’s permissible for me to ask questions about my project once I start getting into it. Life has a way of getting busy, but after the class, I’d like to go every once in a while to maintain the connection. They’re a good group, and a good resource even for somebody working in a library. In fact, Kevin worked on a digital textbook project with a university once, I’d like to hear more about that. It’s a profession-based community, but it felt more like a programming book club to me, right up my alley. Plus, Kojo and I lost by one point in CodeWords, so I have a score to settle.