New upcoming Dutch python meetup: Leiden (NL)¶

Tags: python, django, pun

Important things first: 27 January there’s a python meetup in Leiden (NL) of the new python Leiden user group.

Meetup groups come and go, often depending on one or two people or on a company that organises it. And yes, meetup.com has basically cornered the market, at least in my experience.

There used to be a “PUN”, python usergroup Nederland, meeting that would be held in various cities, depending on the company that hosted it in turn. (For those in NL: Den Haag, Zoetermeer, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Veenendaal, Arnhem, Amsterdam, …). Managed via a mailinglist, as meetup.com didn’t exist yet. Later lots of python and/or django meetup.com-based-meetups were organised. To me, it felt a bit weird that all of them seemed to be city-oriented. Amsterdam python meetup (3 different ones), Amsterdam django meetup, Utrecht (2x), Eindhoven, Rotterdam. I went to many of them, mostly it is just an hour of travel by public transport :-)

I like going to those meetups. You get a feel for what people are doing with python. You get ideas. You learn about libaries (sometimes even from the standard library) that you didn’t know about. New python tricks. For me, it is a great method to keep up-to-date on what’s possible and on what people are enthousiastic about.

At the moment, the number of python meetups in the Netherlands seems a bit low. Perhaps I’m missing something? (I see there’s a pydata one in Amsterdam that I missed.) The last two I attended were the nice PyUtrecht ones. So: I’ll be attending the Leiden one :-)

(Note: I’m talking about meetups, we’re blessed with two one-day python conferences in the Netherlands. pygrunn in May and pycon NL in October.)