shane_perry29•1d agoProlific Poster

Walked into a library coding meetup and saw a guy teaching HTML on a sticky note

I went to this little coding meetup at the downtown library last Tuesday, thinking it'd be a chill place for beginners like me. There were maybe 12 people huddled around a table, and one dude was actually writing JavaScript on a napkin because his laptop died. The organizer kept saying "just Google it" every time someone asked a question, which felt wild for a room full of newbies. I ended up sitting next to a girl who was following along on her phone because her screen was cracked in three places. We spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out why a loop wasn't running, then realized she had a typo in the word "console." The whole thing was chaos but honestly more fun than any tutorial I've watched online. Has anyone else been to a group that somehow makes learning harder instead of easier?

2 comments

2 Comments

rivershah1d ago

Oh man, this whole post is basically my life story compressed into one chaotic night. I once showed up to a coding workshop and the instructor spent the first 20 minutes trying to connect his laptop to the projector, only to finally admit he'd been teaching us the wrong framework the whole time. I felt so cool when I actually fixed someone's bug once, but then I realized I'd just told them to delete a semicolon they didn't need. Honestly, it's like these meetups are designed to make you feel either like a genius or a total fool, and I've definitely been the fool more times than I can count.

janaf761d agoOG Member

Designed to make you feel either like a genius or a total fool" is like the perfect way to put it. Tbh, I read somewhere that a lot of these community events are actually run by volunteers who are just as lost as we are, which honestly makes me feel a bit better. Ngl, @rivershah, your story about the wrong framework is hilarious but also way too real. I think that's just the secret side of tech meetups we don't talk about enough.