An Evening with The Austin Python Meetup : Nov 15, 2022 hosted by Jacob

The Event itself

The meeting was started quite smoothly with the hosts welcoming everyone to the event and encouraging evberyone to be hands on as much as possible for the best experience and learning. The primary goal for the day was to learn about a static code analysis tool call PyLint used in python programming. I felt the meeting was quite vertical with the topic being introduced to even the beginners in the simplest of terms but then also taking deep dives that were meant primariliy for the experts of python programming.

Learnings

Going into the meeting, I did not have much of an idea about static code analysis and what that meant. For me, programming is still just creating simple programs to solve simple probems. but as explained in the meeting, this would be problamatic in a large company with hundreds of developers working in several teams. THere has to be compatibility within the organization when it comes to code standards, quality of the code and a general analysis before deployment to make sure there are no vulnerabilities being overlooked. PyLint is a static code analysis tool which means it looks at code without actually running it. It checks for errors, enforces a coding standard, and can make suggestions about how the code could be refactored. I feel this is the kind of tool that makes the lives of professional programmers easier by making things objective and making sure they pass a standard set by them.

A lot of discussion was done on “linting”. This ofcourse turned out into debugging itself and linters being debugging software.

Would you find value in this kind of event after class?

I feel that although I didn’t quite catch each and everything that was discussed, it was quite fun hanging out with people much smarter than me who volunteer their time to teach others about python and how to be better programmers in general. This goes above and beyond what you can learn in a class and is essentially learning from industry veterans. I was overall very impressed with this meetup.

How was the experience different from your expectations?

I did not have any specific expectations from this meetup and initially assumed it is meant for general discussion on python programming maybe even targetting begineers. It turned out a bit different from my expectations but in the end I do understand the reasons for it. The developers picked a topic and wanted to cover the length and bredth so the participants knew all about it. This also encourages participating in more meetups since you gain knowlwdge of more topics.

Would I go to another meetup?

I would definitely want to attend another meetup in the future. The learning potential in these meetings is simply great. I would like to have the agenda known as for a beginner, the meeting can seem a bit overwhelming so I would want to attend a meetup where I can contribute fully and learn a lot. Also, in person meetups work best with me as I like to connect with people and learn face to face.