I'd suggest going to local programmer meetups. This should be pretty obvious, but let me clarify that. Most meetups are centered around a certain technology or

I'd suggest going to local programmer meetups. This should be pretty obvious, but let me clarify that. Most meetups are centered around a certain technology or language and this tends to discourage people who are working with different technologies from attending. My advice : go anyway. Hackers are generally happy to meet other hackers, regardless of whatever they might be hacking on. For talking with people it helps to do a bit of research into whatever the meetup is centered around and finding some common ground. For example, say you're a Ruby coder doing web stuff and you can't find any group in your region that's doing Ruby. Find a Python, PHP or Perl group. There's a good chance that these people will be doing some web stuff too. That's a HUGE problem domain that you share. You can start on sharing experiences with session/state storage, databases, ORM performance and restrictions, test suites, logging, auditing, load-balancing, scalability issues, runtime bottlenecks, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. Not everybody attending a meetup is a code freak. There are plenty of people who show up for, well, who knows why they show up. The beer and an excuse to leave the house maybe? Others might be recruiters scouting for talent. Some people are just there because they got dragged along with someone else. Talk to them, be polite and move on. What you're looking for is fellow hackers. You'll know them when you find them.