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Matt Soucy

RocPy: Rochester Python Meetup

in life by Matt Soucy - Comments

This week, I went to a meeting of RocPY, the Rochester Python user group. A friend and I travelled with the HFOSS class as part of the curriculum. I was interested at the thought of attending my first user group meetup, but I was sad to say that it left a bit to be desired.

The first half of the meetup was an “Intro to Python”, for the students who weren’t familiar with it but were in the HFOSS course. As I’m more than just faintly familiar with Python, I wasn’t paying full attention to that, but I found some parts that I was less than thrilled about - the speaker covered mainly data types, but didn’t touch upon classes, and barely touched other syntax beyond loops. I felt that it provided a good beginning, but was also laced with many intermissions and (in my opinion) serious gaps in the presenter’s knowledge, particularly where it concerned things newer than Python 2.6. Although most of those things weren’t strictly essential to the presentation, they didn’t exactly show confidence and full understanding, which would be worrying to me if I were the intended recepient of the presentation.

The second half was devoted to lightning talks - five-minute presentations where people demonstrated their projects and showcased Python knowledge. Several groups from the Advanced FOSS class demonstrated their projects and ideas, and several friends demoed cool Python-based projects. I presented a snippet of RepBot that was particularly interesting that concerned functions and complex decorators, and another friend demoed a cool library prototype that he had been working on relating implicit function currying.

Overall, the meetup was alright, but I felt somewhat unsatisfied when I left. This was possibly due to the mixed skill levels in the group, as I didn’t feel particularly challenged or enlightened afterward. I would rate it at 4/8 Stallman Beards.