An evening with the Portland Python Users Group

Hey folks, Luc here. Last week, I did something that I now understand to be an essential element of anyone’s journey from would-be developer to developer: I attended my first programming meet-up.

Portland is blessed with an incredibly vibrant start-up and web development culture for a city of its size, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. The Portland Python User Group is a shining exemplar of this culture.

Their monthly meet-ups at the headquarters of Urban Airship are a great opportunity to both mingle with and hear presentations from incredibly bright Python enthusiasts. They also have monthly “hack nights” for those that have projects or ideas and want to find collaborators. Very cool.

Overall, I had a good time at the meet-up. A lot of what was formally presented was pretty opaque to me, and the presentations assumed a lot of prior knowledge that I don’t yet have. This part of the evening was not tailored for beginners. My knowledge of Python is pretty limited at this point (I haven’t gotten too far beyond basic string and array methods), but the meet-up convinced me that acquiring deep fluency in Python will be a necessity for me at some point in the future (I’ll let you know when that happens).

But the more free-form conversations that I had with people afterward were very stimulating. Highlights included a lively but respectful debate between a .NET/C#/VisualStudio enthusiast and a few committed Pythonistas and some scattered claims that Clojure may just be the future. I didn’t have much to add to these discussions, but who knows? Another month of knowledge accumulation and I might just throw out some similarly bold claims at the next meet-up, which will be on Tuesday, June 12th, also at the Urban Airship HQ (334 NW 11th Ave.).

If you’re in Portland and you have a more-than-elementary grasp of Python, you’ll find plenty of kindred spirits at the monthly meet-ups.

Here are some links to pictures:

1. Rogue Dead Guy Ale on tap, with yours truly pouring it. Score!
2. Urban Airship’s mock airship, which is huge and inside the building. Awesome.
3. Presentation on TastyPie from Eric Holscher.
4. Folks milling about, in hot anticipation of the evening’s festivities.

Not shown: the post-meet-up festivities at Bailey’s Tap Room…

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