I did make the Python meetup and several since; it's not like the waitlist was thousands long. It was just longer than what I gauged as the no-show rate. The P

I did make the Python meetup and several since; it's not like the waitlist was thousands long. It was just longer than what I gauged as the no-show rate. The Python meetup was striking to me because it was closer to the scale of a PyCon than any meetup I'd seen. The actual meetup I attend more often is SFPUG, the local PostgreSQL group, which is more in the neighborhood of 20-40 attendees, once or twice a month. In NYC, if there is an active group around the particular corner of tech you inhabit, you're lucky to get decent meetup a quarter. And quality is what pushed me to move here, despite my expectations, in the first place. Simply put, all of the very best developers I knew from my hometown (in Charlotte, before my stint in New York) had moved here. There were two in particular I'll always owe for having opened my eyes to how little I knew; I work maybe eight blocks away from one of them, the other I ran into out-of-the-blue at the aforementioned Python meetup, three days after I landed at SFO. I've been working with people who make me very aware that I'm not the smartest person in the room (by their expertise, not their attitudes) for 30 months now. I do hate to say this, but it is why I didn't stick around in the end - in NYC, I really, really missed that.