Lifelong Angelenos with an appreciation for well-written Ruby, some JavaScript, mechanical keyboards and other thoughtfully-crafted tools:
People from all over the Southern California area have traveled long distances to come and code at our meetup - as far north as Goleta, Santa Barbara County, east as Montclair, San Bernardino County, and south as Irvine, Orange County. Our meetup attendees write many different coding languages and speak many different human languages. We’re proud to have such a diverse group representing the best of Southern California at our events.
Our first meetup was in August of 2015, at Opodz in Little Tokyo.
Since then, we’ve been meeting every other Wednesday in Little Tokyo, and then a bit east of the Arts District, then up near the valley in Universal City. As of fall 2016, we're back in downtown Los Angeles and also added a second location in downtown Santa Monica.
We wanted to devote a space and time in the downtown-area to practice what we believe in:
- learning and teaching through pair programming,
- in any programming language,
- using and improving free and open-source software tools.
Inspired by agile extreme programming practitioners and meetup organizers like Pivotal Labs in Santa Monica and open source contributors like Katrina Owen of Exercism, we wanted to continue our own personal learning and learn with others in Los Angeles through workshop-style meetups. We noticed there weren't any regularly-meeting, beginner-friendly, language/framework-aganostic meetups in the downtown area that focused on coding together. So we started one. It’s important to us to keep empowering others to craft the meetup to align with their own learning goals, while making sure organizers do not get burnt out.