If a meetup looks interesting but you have no clue about the particular technology, don’t worry. I have attended several meetups where the talk focused on a language or framework that I have never worked with before, but I always got something out of the talks and conversations. Here I’ll describe some particular experiences I have had in the Portland area.

Portland DevOps Groundup

I started attending this meetup before I even knew anything about DevOps. There were talks about:

• An automated pipeline for transcribing podcasts
• How to prevent bugs
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform

And our very own Serverless Guru Ryan Jones gave a talk about serverless development.

At DevOps Groundup, I remember meeting DevOps engineers and data scientists from New Relic, Jaguar autonomous driving, and SurveyMonkey.

The location, New Relic’s Portland office, is high up in the U.S. Bancorp Tower, a 536-ft tall skyscraper, offering sweeping views of Portland.

Who should go?
DevOps engineers, system administrators, solutions architects, front end developers, full stack developers, backend developers, cloud developers, data scientists…

Even if you just do UI coding, it is still so fascinating to see the architecture that supports your apps. And if you’re a backend engineer, it’s good to get a better understanding of how DevOps engineers can help keep your data secure and reliable and where the responsibilities for security are shared.

Portland Python User Group

I didn’t have much Python experience when I attended PDX Python, but this meetup left me with a positive memory.

About sixty engineers filled almost every seat. I took the only empty seat in the first row. My neighbors at the table were all engineers at Vacasa. I scheduled a coffee with one of them for later that week. (See How to Stay in Touch in 5 Tips for Tech Networking.)

Speaking of Vacasa, they host meetups regularly at their beautiful headquarters, including this upcoming one about how Vacasa does AWS serverless development.

One talk at the Python meetup that stood out to me was an engineer’s attempt to make his own git-like version control system, written in Python. He didn’t go into detail on the code itself and talked high-level logic, so even a non-Pythoner could have followed along.

Who should go?
DevOps engineers, system administrators, solutions architects, front end developers, full stack developers, backend developers, cloud developers, data scientists…

If you’re a Python master, you’ll be with your tribe and you’ll feel inspired.

And if you haven’t used Python yet, it’s a beautiful language and these talks might pique your interest. I even met a guy there who was just starting to learn Python because he wanted to automate his manual job of queueing up soccer broadcasts on a Portland TV station.

At Serverless Guru, we use Python not only for backend code but also in a DevOps/Cloud-Development sort of way, to write scripts that support our implementation of the Serverless Framework.

Vancouver Full Stack

Vancouver, WA is just a 20-minute drive from downtown Portland when traffic’s not bad. Despite being so close, the Vancouver tech community has its own unique identity. The Vancouver Full Stack meetup just started in 2019. It’s small but has highly experienced full-stack developers.

The speakers have included an engineer from Microsoft and Jamon Holmgren (co-founder of Infinite Red, a contributor to React Native, and an organizer of React Native Portland).

Who should go?
By now, you might have noticed that I think it doesn’t matter what type of engineer you are. If you haven’t been to a software meetup in Vancouver, WA yet, this is the one. There may be a waitlist.

Still need motivation to go to a meetup?

Last but not least, if you’re concerned about not having time for dinner between work and a meetup, don’t worry. Pretty much all tech meetups have at least a serious amount of pizza, if not an entire spread of desserts and antipasti.