First Coding Meet-up
First Coding Meet-up

First Coding Meet-up

Well I was sat here quite merrily going through the React I course on Codecademy, as one of my more immediate goals is to learn React as it seems to be the one front-end technology that I can learn that will most assist in making me more employable.

And then it decided to crash.  So I figured it was a good time to do one of the blog posts I have on my to-do list (not yet powered by React).

Last week I went to my first London-based coding Meet-up.

Well, CSS anyway.  CSS Meetup London, to give it its full name.

I had two aims.  Firstly to learn about grid, which was one of the presentations.  Secondly to meet some people in the industry.  You know – networking.

I arrived early, into the offices of Badoo – a social networking company that I had never previously heard of, who were hosting the event, and supplying beer and pizza, within their rest area/canteen.

It wasn’t so easy to tell who was there because they worked there, and who was actually there for the presentations like myself.  I grabbed a slice of absolutely amazing pizza and stood in the corner, a little awkwardly, hoping someone would note that I am a newbie and introduce themselves.

They didn’t.  I had another slice of pizza and grabbed a beer.  There were a few small groups talking to each other, but most people were sat by themselves, some staring into laptops (the guy I sat next to never paid any attention the whole time except to his laptop).  I did attempt some small talk with a couple of people but I didn’t receive any more than an acknowledgement.

The presentations themselves were reasonably good.  It isn’t easy to get up in front of a room and talk, especially about a technical subject for which you may receive some difficult questions.

The first talk was on CSS Grid, which is quite an exciting new specification coming out widely this March, I believe, which will allow for much more straight-forward layout structuring.

Flexbox has been a revelation to me as positioning could be troublesome previously.  The hope is the Grid will be revelatory too.

The second talk was more abstract, questioning as to whether there is a war within CSS.  I’m not going to attempt to explain it as I didn’t thoroughly understand it, only having done my CSS directly on stylesheets.


Afterwards there was a trip to the pub, which I thought might be my opportunity to meet people.  I popped to the loo, went back in the room to find the same couple of groups talking to each other, stood like a lemon for a couple of minutes and then left.

It was an interesting evening.  I’m not going to rush back but when there is a subject matter being discussed that I am interested in I shall attend again.

There are plenty of other meet-ups that look interesting – there was one the following night for WordPress, where there was lots of comments saying “such a friendly bunch” or “thanks for making a newbie so welcome” – which is clearly what I was looking for.  The CSS one doesn’t seem to be good for networking, though I do need to go back to find out what make of pizza that was.

I will definitely go to more meet-ups but I will try different groups.  Especially if there are giving away free pizza!  If I lived in central London I could probably get fed for free every night.

And yeah, it looks like I won’t be completing that React course today.  Onto something else.

 

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