The tech community in Ohio is very active and diverse. Thanks to Meetup.com, I’ve been able to discover quite a lot of interesting meetings in the neighborhood.

STARTUP Columbus “Startup Saturdays” – Monthly Meetup – July 27th

Conducted on the last Saturday of every month. I’ve written an entire post about this here. Nice experience.

Columbus CodeJam – July 31st

A casual meetup of people interested in coding. Got to meet a .Net developer, a ruby developer etc among other programmers. Chit chat over pizzas & coke . Also made a good friend – Yemane Abebe, an electrical undergrad from OSU. He was interested in learning web development. We met up in later days to do some website development.

Angular JS meetup – Aug 7th

Hosted by Command Alkon. Got to meet people who actively use Angular JS for production level development. Though the discussion was very technical, they were newbie friendly and gave many pointers to start out with Angular. Also Pizzas, beer n coke.
Like we have WAMP, there is a whole JS based stack  – MEAN stack. Some of the resources I came to know from the meetup:

• Angular Seed – a skeletal application for starting off with Angular.
• Yeoman – a collection of tools to help you in scaffolding apps, manage packages, build & test them etc. Helps you quickly create apps using AngularJS,  HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, Modernizr, Twitter Bootstrap etc.
• Lineman – similar to Yeoman, but comes with various settings preconfigured.
• Batarang –  debugging tool for AngularJS
• Egghead.io – detailed video tutorial series on AngularJS. Also http://www.davemo.com/
• Sample contact app – maintained by one of the developers from the meetup

 Python DoJo – Aug 9th

This was an interesting meetup as well. It is conducted every friday at 6PM (planning to be a regular). I met Kenneth Wee, co-founder at ZoopShop. Also many interesting python coders. They were keen to help me jump-start my Python adoption. Provided me with references, tutorials, books and in fact a laptop to try things out during the meetup. Had a really awesome time. There was an after-meetup party as well but I couldn’t stay for it as it was getting late and the place was a bit far off. Key resources I came to know:

• IPython Notebook – A standalone python server that provides a complete coding environment with features to even share our work, plot advanced graphics etc.
• ReadTheDocs – easy documentation for everything.
• OverAPI – collection of cheat-sheets for lots of languages.
• PyVideo – video archive of python related talks
• Project Euler – an interesting set of mathematical & programming questions. Makes a great compliment to IPython Notebook for learning python. Presently in the process of trying it out.
• VirtualENV –  A tool to isolate various Python environments & avoid thus avoid version conflict for packages.
• PEP8 –  styling guide