The ChiPy meetings are almost always excellent (except when they’re in the burbs and impossible to get to without a car). Some of my favorite previous topics were on Django, functional programming, Selenium, and cvs2svn (all of which were by primary authors of the projects).
This is an excellent technical group for any programmer — spend a couple minutes picking up Python and hurry to a meeting. There a number of very talented people in the group and interesting technical and theoretical topics are raised regularly.
In February 2006 I organized a social gathering so loop workers could pre-funk (on coffee) in the couple hours between work and meetings. This may be catching on as a regular occurrence.
I presented at the June 2006 meeting about my unicode-art project. There were only a dozen people as the meeting was announced late, but I walked through my motivation, code, and results to great response.
