In the Seattle area, most data science meetups originate from a company called Galvanize. Some of their worksshops are helpful, but I find the constant pressure to enroll in one of their classes or bootcamps to be rather intrusive. There are a few smaller groups composed of enthusiasts that meet up a lot less regularly. One group was called the data vis meetup with a small group of ten people. There was a representation from a mix of disciplines. One apparent trait was the group primarily favored R over Python because there were more staticians in the group. The group recently got a sponsorship from R Studio!
I spoke with someone who worked at a startup in Austin, TX where he tracked movement of bicycles across rental stations. He had the entire project on github as well as a blog post on his analysis. Some of the data is not available due to privacy concerns, but the analysis is outline from data wrangling, EDA, and machine learning portions - exactly as how it should be done for capstone projects. Another grad student at University of Washington studies bioinformatics who introduced a few tools in Python for analyzing DNA file types. There was also a web developer who had GIS data on number of traffic collisions in Seattle and was working on a dashboard for metrics using Vue.js.
The meetup provided a ton of inspiration for projects as well as opening up an interest to using a variety of different technologies!