Triple-cream Meetup Day
Yesterday I attended three developer Meetups. I travel into Manhattan to attend meetings at Code & Coffee. Code & Coffee meets at either BrainStation or General Assembly in New York. BrainStation and General Assembly are both coding bootcamp schools for programmers and developers.
Code & Coffee Meetups start with an introduction circle. Each person has an opportunity to announce their name, what they do, and what they are looking for. Usually around 150 people attend and introductions take awhile.
Afterwards attendees mill around the coffee, chat and network. There are two lectures offered that people can attend, watch and listen to speakers. A few people break out their computers but it's not that sort of event. Many of the people at Code & Coffee are recent bootcamp graduates. They all know React and they are all looking for work.
I am eager to work on my projects and I come with my computer ready to work. I network and watch lectures too, but lately I've squirreled myself off to the side and set to work. People come and talk to me. They ask questions and I show a little of what I know.
Before the Covid 19 pandemic I went to many Meetups. One that still exists is called Hacker Hours. Hacker Hours used to meet in person and people would bring their computers and work. We often met on the second floor of Capital One Bank south of Union Square. The bank offers lounging space with free WiFi and electric sockets to plug-in and work.
Hacker Hours does not seem to host live meetings anymore. Hacker Hours has a Discord and on some Sunday afternoons a man who now lives in Texas hosts sessions. When I got to Code & Coffee I logged onto the Hacker Hours Discord and chatted with the host. I told him about a programming problem that I have and he shared a tutorial to guide me. I spent the rest of the day following the tutorial and improving my program.
After Code & Coffee I went home. I joined another Meetup on Discord, named Pair Programming.
Pair Programming seems to post meetings often on Meetup.com. There were meetings for Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. There is a video for attendees to watch that shows how to install and use LiveShare on VS Code. I've worked with many people using LiveShare. I can show what I am doing and we work across the Internet on files together.
Last night a man from Texas came and also a man from Cincinnati. The man from Cincinnati and I had met the night before and we talked. When we first met I showed the Cincinnati man my Eleventy JamStack. I showed him a little about Node and the Command Line. Last night he was studying Node tutorials.
The Three of us talked about what our companies are like. Both of them work for older companies that use older programming languages. I shared about StackBlitz CodeFlow and I posted a video from last year's Vite Conference.
After a while I signed off to continue work on my Eleventy project. I implemented the changes from the tutorial I got earlier from Hacker Hours. I worked until 11:30 and I got it working.
All-in-all it was a fun and productive day. I am grateful for the opportunities to meet other developers. They guide me and I can offer mentoring too.