Tonight, I am going to my first meetup for what I am calling Code Bash. It is not a terribly original idea, but after going to PyOhio, a Python developer conference, my friends and I had the idea that we wanted to work on projects more and that we missed the times in college where we all got together and jammed out code together. We decided that every Wednesday, we would meet at someone's apartment, someone would bring food, someone would bring beer, and we would all work on a project of ours.
The thought of course, is similar to other goals. For example, you get a workout buddy at the gym to make you more likely to go and to make the experience better. We want to make sure that time is set aside to do some recreational coding. It also provides people to ask questions and bounce ideas off of.
Maybe in the future we will grow this to be something like Michigan's Coffee House Coders, but for the moment, we are keeping it as a small group of friends getting together.
The first project that I intend to work on is my Magic: The Gathering IRC Bot. I want to do some refactoring and decoupling with it as well as add a couple new features. The main one I want to add is fuzzy searching. There appear to be a couple libraries in python for it, but I plan on asking the people I am meeting with what they think.