My First Zig Day
714 words - 3 minutes
Introduction
I had never attended a local programming meetup, Zig or otherwise, prior to August 30, 2026. I just happened to open Zig's Discord server and saw there was a Zig Day Seattle event scheduled in 3 days (that would also have Andrew Kelley attending). I reached out to the organizer, Scott Redig, to see if someone with no experience with C, C++, Zig, or Rust was able to attend (I didn't want to take a spot someone else could've used). Scott said people new to the language were always welcome, and so I RSVPd to go!
Preparation
Honestly, the biggest preparation I had to do was just mentally. Being this was the first developer meetup I'd ever attend, I wasn't familiar with Zig, nor other systems languages (outside of Go). I was nervous I'd go and not "fit in", because I was just some senior platform engineer. Despite that though, I told myself it'd be good to go, even if I spent the whole time working on Ziglings.
The Meetup
Sunday, August 30, 2026 at 11am I arrived at the Bothell Library in Bothell, WA. After validating parking, I was directed to the conference room where the meetup would be.
After a couple minutes to let everyone gather in the room, Scott had us all stand in a circle, introduce ourselves, talk about what we were going to work on (if we had a project in mind already) and/or if we were new to the language. I was surprised by the diversity of careers people had that were attending. Some people were full time C/C++ developers. Some people were either students or recent graduates. One person was an electrician and did programming as a hobby. As far as I know, I was the only person there who spent their day writing web services and messing with servers.
After introductions, Andrew Kelley took all of us that were new to the language, helped us get setup with Zig, download Ziglings, and helped with any issues we had with setting up or with the problems themselves. After ~30 minutes he went to go work on projects with other people and on his language.
To be honest, I was pretty surprised at how open Andrew Kelley was to questions, comments, and/or concerns people had about Zig.
People would say that something didn't make sense, and Andrew would ask why, what would make it better, what their expectations were, etc.
At one point Andrew even went around asking people their opinion about the files named build.zig and build.zig.zon and whether the names should be kept the same, or changed to something else.
He asked every single person; people who contributed to the stdlib, people who had never written a line of Zig before, and everyone in between.
That, to me, was one of the coolest things about going there. Seeing how much Andrew truly cares about Zig and solving the problems people have with it (however small they may be).
The People
Every person I interacted with was pretty chill, and that was super nice. Some people worked for startups, some people worked for Google, others were students, but no one had a "I'm better than you" mentality.
I was pretty open with my lack of "systems" knowledge, and how I had never touched C, C++, Zig, or Rust before. This actually caused someone named Luke to sit down and give me a crash course in systems programming and how the thought processes between GC languages (only things I've worked in) and non-GC languages differ. Luke writes C code for his day job, and spent a lot of time writing Rust as a hobby. With that background, he also explained all the nuances between C, Rust, Zig, and why his preference lie with Zig.
Final Thoughts
Honestly, it was an absolute blast attending Zig Day Seattle, and I'm excited to go to any future ones! Everyone was so kind, knowledgable, and willing to share their knowledge.
If you're even remotely interested in attending one, look at the Zig day website and see if there's any happening near you! I highly recommend it, even if systems level stuff isn't your day job.