Planning to Meet Charleston

     There were a few groups from the list that I was interested in attending meetings for. My first choice is the Agile Group. Agile development seems to be the most desirable type of development for today’s employers and I think that being a part of that group would not only help increase my understanding and skills on the subject, but also look pretty good on a resume. Unfortunately, they do not have an open calendar, so I submitted a request to join their LinkedIn group. There were a couple of familiar faces from my contacts who are already a part of the group. We’ll see what their meeting schedule is like once I get an invitation.

     The second group I was interested in was the Charleston Tech Group. This group seems a bit more broad as far as topics covered, but upon looking at their ‘meetup’ website, I was pleased to find that they had a great range of interesting things in their meetings. Topics covered everything from 3D printing to Java games to Android UI development and more. There are two meetings that are being planned at the moment. The first is for JVM languages (such as Clojure) which I thought was interesting because that is what Jason’s group is using in their project this semester. The other is about UML / Graphic design tools to model process flow. This might not be the most exciting talk to attend, but I do feel that it would be educational. There is a lot of automation possible when you model a program in UML tool that can generate code based off of the UML relationships. Sadly, neither of these meetings have dates pinned to them yet, so I’m not sure when/if they’ll actually happen. It looks like their last meeting was almost exactly 11 months ago, so I’m not sure how active they are.

     The third group I was pretty excited about was the SCSLUG group – Charleston South Carolina Linux Users Group. There was a funny post on their Google+ page by someone who said: “…my Linux pimp hand is not as strong as I would like…”. It’s pretty funny, but it’s also similar to how I feel. When I first started using Linux in ’07 I was very intrigued, but also a little apprehensive. My friend that showed it to me was very intelligent and I was a little intimidated by it, almost thinking that it was only for smart people to use. I don’t think the same way about it nowadays, but I still don’t know how to fully leverage the strong points of Linux, so I think attending this group would be a great learning experience. By looking at all of the pictures they had up on Flikr, it seems like a pretty friendly group as well! Apparently, they meet every second Saturday of the month, though, so it won’t be until April 12^th before they have their next meeting. Hopefully one of the other groups will have a meeting coming up sooner. If not, I might talk to some classmates and see if they found anything else interesting that is coming up sooner.