13 ms·

A reawakening of systems programming meetups

392 points by paulgb 2y ago

convolvatron 2y ago
just tried to look - SF distributed systems meetup was a one-shot affair?
- msgilligan 2y ago
  I'm hoping that is not the case. I signed up in the hopes there will be more.
  - convolvatron 2y ago
    I suppose we could meet at Lovejoy's tea room and talk about our favorite parts of the paxos paper
Aurornis 2y ago
> I used to attend a bunch of meetups before the pandemic. But I quickly got disillusioned. Almost every meetup was varying degrees of startups pitching their product. The last straw for me was sitting through a talk at a JavaScript meetup that was by a devrel employee of a startup who literally gave a tutorial for their product. My favorite local meetups fell to problems like this. It was easy to filter out the DevRel people trying to advertise. The hard problem was filtering out people who were only interested in presenting something so they could show another presentation on their resume or personal brand website, with no interest in engaging with the meetup. These people would want to only show up for the one meetup where they got to present. They’d present some simple content designed to make them look good, with little regard to educating or discussing things. They’d often have some excuse for needing to leave quickly after presenting, some times before any QA time. And they always needed a video recording of themselves speaking. For a while we had these to stream to remote viewers, but if the camera gear wasn’t available they’d panic and spend a lot of time improvising a way to record it with their phone even if delayed the presentation. Getting the recording of themselves speaking was the primary goal, not actually speaking to the group. After this happens enough times, the core members realize they’re being used as audience props for someone’s career advancement and they stop coming. The meetup collapses. I hope my local meetup groups can have a little resurgence like this where people are primarily interested in the meetup, not the self promotion opportunity.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, it annoys me that a lot of functional programming stuff kind of fell into cryptocurrency startups. There definitely is interesting enough tech behind crypto, but a lot of these talks end up kind of devolving into why their product is amazing and better than all the other coins and why you should invest in their ICO.
  - cachvico 2y ago
    Haskell?
    - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
      Cardano?
    - tombert 2y ago
      Last meetup I saw it was an OCaml meetup.
- atmosx 2y ago
  Communities without some kind of curation don't survive in the long run. That should be, historically at least, clear by now.
- griftrejection 2y ago
  The solution is simple: vet the talks, vet the presenter, and don't focus on technology that is popular for grifting. Sorry, but I've been to enough JS/TS meetups to know what's happening. But that world is full of marketing and people who want funding. Compare this to a BSD meetup or a 2600 meetup. Nobody's trying to sell you stuff there.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  this is a problem of the job market. most celebrated talks are from people well employed for life so they can talk shit at some system or protocol. from upnp to the persistent compiler worm talks. those folks didn't expect to depend on their resume padding every 3 to 8 months to live. likewise the people organizing the talks didn't depends on the status sending devRel people to expect sponsors. this is exactly what doctorow is yapping about lately. but everyone only accept small points of the big picture.
screye 2y ago
I'm surprised that universities don't open their doors to such events for everyone. 'Systems' is fairly industry-focused. So, academia-industry partnerships on seminars seems like a great idea. It's a shame (and imo, mind boggling) that SF proper doesn't have a tier 1 university. While Stanford and Berkeley are very close, the lack of a grounding institution makes SF culture feel 'dispersed'.
- mechanicker 2y ago
  Would love UC Berkeley to revive innovation and collaboration as seen during the BSD days.
  - musicale 2y ago
    So RISC-V isn't enough for you? ;-) More seriously, it does seem like there were a number of interesting systems research and development collaborations in the 1980s: BSD at Berkeley, Athena at MIT, Andrew at CMU, etc. Currently it seems like the interest, funding, opportunities, and incentives for academic researchers are largely for short-term projects and AI/ML rather than long-term, ongoing systems projects. The modern funding and publishing landscape seems to emphasize speed and quantity over quality and impact. Moreover, it seems that companies with deep pockets (Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia) may be less likely to collaborate with and/or fund academic projects as IBM and DEC did in the 1980s. It could be that those partnerships weren't hugely beneficial for AT&T, IBM and DEC's businesses.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    eXperimental Computing Facility isn't enough for you?
- weinzierl 2y ago
  The mentioned TUMuchdata is held at an university. I think a lot depends on the individuals behind such activities. I don't know anyone behind TUMuchdata and had no contact to the department for years but the chair is still the same as when I studied there and I think he might be exactly the person that would permit or even foster such activities.
weinzierl 2y ago
> First off, don't pay for anything yourself. Find a company who will host. At the same time, don't feel the need to give in too much to the demands of the company. Or go the same route as the mentioned TUMuchdata[1] which apparently kicked off the activities in the post. They are simply meeting at their university. I know at least one Rust Meetup near them, that deliberately decided to meet at the public library (with permission) and forgo any company sponsorships. [1] The pun here is that TUM is the common abbreviation for Technical University Munich.
- mzinsmeister 2y ago
  We are very lucky to have both the university to host our weekly events and also to have Alex Petrov on our side who is very well connected to all kinds of companies and helps us a lot in finding venues for our Munich Database Meetup which we only organize once every 1-2 months or so.
walterbell 2y ago
> I started feeling a bit embarrassed that a graduate student had more guts than I had to get back onto the meetup organizer wagon. Inter-generational perpetual embarrassment engine for innovation.
demondemidi 2y ago
Meetup.com was on fire with maker, programming, and tech meetups in Portland in 2010-2014. Some were huge (I recall the auditorium for Puppet Labs wall-to-wall one point). Then ... poof. All gone, even before the pandemic. And it was super diverse topics: everything from NodeJS & Rust, and HTML1.0 to startups, manufacturing, and IoT hacking: heck, there was meetup for RF circuit enthusiasts! I just checked and there's still CTRL-H going strong, but not much else. From what I heard from two regular organizers is that it is just a LOT of work to run a consistently solid meetup, and eventually exhausting. I can see that: I remember thinking, "I could help but do I really want to use my small amount of free time for this?" So, hats off to people who ran those awesome meetups (Thubten, I'm looking at you!).
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Exhausting plus everyone has to make a meetup account plus meetup started charging more and more plus why not just use Facebook since I'm the only one without a Facebook account Maybe a federated alternative will take off soon. It would be nice if email was federated in practice
  - shagie 2y ago
    https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilizon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilizon ) Also from a few days ago - Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398
- walterbell 2y ago
  > Meetup.com was on fire with maker, programming, and tech meetups in Portland in 2010-2014. Some were huge (I recall the auditorium for Puppet Labs wall-to-wall one point). Then ... poof. All gone, even before the pandemic. [2017] Acquired by WeWork [2018] Founder steps down as CEO [2019] New pricing model [2020] WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp [2024] Bending Spoons announced it will acquire Meetup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup
sausajez 2y ago
Strange you say this, I just got together with a bunch of people and revived an old user group that I used to run, seems like there's a itch to get out and socialise again
billfor 2y ago
The old DECUS meetings were fun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS
shae 2y ago
Who's up for one in Boston? I'll organize if I can find some speakers.
- kaizoku20 2y ago
  +1
- rahuldave 2y ago
  Count me in on organizing as well. And not just for systems but ml/llm adjacent infra and databases as well. Things like arrow and lancedb for example
- tstack 2y ago
  There’s a handmade meetup in Boston you might want to check out — https://handmadecities.com/meetups/ https://handmadecities.com/meetups/
- otras 2y ago
  Just the other day, I was checking to see if there were any active ones in the Boston area. I'd definitely be up for one, and I'd be more than happy to do a talk and/or help organize.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  I go to a Linux User Group meetup at Lowell Makes[0] on the 2nd and 4th Thursday. You don't have to be a member of the makerspace to join, but it is a very nice resource :) Our meetups have been very casual, just hanging out with some laptops, sometimes with pizza and beer. We tend to just talk about projects we think are cool, and things we're working on or learning. https://lowellmakes.spaces.nexudus.com/events/1415349776/linux-user-group-at-lowell-makes-membersguests https://lowellmakes.spaces.nexudus.com/events/1415349776/lin... Also I am the "Robby" on the "contact..." line, so if you have questions feel free to direct them at me :D [0] https://lowellmakes.com/ https://lowellmakes.com/
__turbobrew__ 2y ago
I was on the board of directors for a local Linux Users Group and can echo the difficulties in finding a venue. In a city full of empty office spaces on a weekday night it was virtually impossible to find a stable meeting location. Without a stable meeting location you are much less likely to establish a core group since people do not like to have to learn how to get to different venues. Mozilla hosted us at one point but the political tides changed there and we got kicked out. I think having strong buy in from someone in the C-suite of a company is the only real way to do it. Otherwise you are beholden to the changing winds of the company. In the end we are now in a stable location in the local library, but only because we had someone on the inside. Previously when we approached the library we were stone walled without someone to grease the wheels. I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. In many locations you can no longer pool some money with your buddies to buy a piece of land to build your clubhouse on. In my city there are many such clubs which were formed 50 years ago — the sailing club, the badminton club, the lawn bowling club, etc — but land is too scarce in many places now and we need the municipalities to pick up the slack.
- packetlost 2y ago
  > I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. I never realized this was something that was needed so bad, but yeah. In my city we have a bunch of privately owned venues that you can rent, but the cost ranges from reasonable to very not reasonable. To be fair, a lot of my local technical meetups just hang out at one of the quieter restaurant/bars in the area and it seems to work ok for them. The downside is you don't have any way to present anything. Another group I regularly go to is a local DefCon chapter that rents out space above a "barcade" (arcade + bar) and aside from being a bit hot in the summer, the vibes are great and the community doubly so.
  - bonestamp2 2y ago
    I know some groups meet at a city library (many of them have meeting rooms that can be booked for free or for a small fee). We had this same problem and ended up starting a (non-profit) makerspace where we now host several meetups. It's win/win really. We are all about building community and bringing people together with similar interests is a great way to do that. It has also helped us get more paying members.
torontopizza 2y ago
I started a Toronto meetup with people here on HN and the Fediverse. Running a stable IRL meetup is a lot of work!
- kewbish 2y ago
  Curious if you have a link to your event page?
  - devdao 2y ago
    Toronto's Tech Pizza Mondays https://social.linux.pizza/@Techpizzamondays https://social.linux.pizza/@Techpizzamondays If you're here, you belong and you are invited and welcome
toyg 2y ago
> although 60 people say Yes initially, by the time of the event we have typically gotten about 50 people in attendance That's actually pretty good. Most free events (of any kind) will typically see attendance rates around 30-50% of RSVPs.
mattrighetti 2y ago
I recently moved to London and I wanted to start participating in these kind of events, where’s the best place to look for them?
- paulgb 2y ago
  I haven’t been to one yet, but from afar I hear great things about the London Future of Coding meetups.
- mgaunard 2y ago
  There are regular C++ meetups, which I expect would cover systems programming. It seems however cloud/web people have a different idea of what systems programming is.
  - twic 2y ago
    Is that ACCU, or someone else now?
    - mgaunard 2y ago
      ACCU London is not very active anymore, I think CppLondon pretty much took over (it was the same guy as the CppOnSea conference, but I think he started asking other people to arrange it now). I don't know if it's that great these days, but it's a meetup I used to present at in the past, and I remember having fun getting beers with attendees afterwards.
- normie3000 2y ago
  A decade ago meetup.com was the place to look - if you wanted you could have gone to a different meet up every night, from Linux user group, python testing group, London Java community etc. It seems like some of these are still active on meetup.com, so that might be a good starting point.
- harry_ord 2y ago
  Been ages for me. Only London one I attended was the perl mongers meet ups but those were drinking based.
vsgherzi 2y ago
Ive been struggling to find good meetups in the san diego los angeles area. meetup.com seems pretty dead.. any suggestions?
- john-tells-all 2y ago
  Los Angeles area: - OWASP security meetup: this is great! Hosted at a WeWork or a local company. Great stuff. I'm not sure their funding model, but it's working. https://www.meetup.com/owasp-los-angeles/ https://www.meetup.com/owasp-los-angeles/ - Socal Python: we haven't found good venues that support talks so... the meetings are more social hours. This is fine. https://www.meetup.com/socalpython/ https://www.meetup.com/socalpython/ - LA DevOps: only one physical meeting so far. The bar let us show slides in a nice patio in the back, but it was so loud I couldn't hear. I hope they'll find a better venue. https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-ZZQWJLTm/ https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-ZZQWJLTm/ I'd love to start giving talks again, on "Fast Development" and organizational topics, but have prioritized my job for the moment. Ah well.
- ZephyrP 2y ago
  The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see something like it again. If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.
zeristor 2y ago
In London there was Skillsmatter's Code Node. Skillsmatter had trouble getting continued funding, however CodeNode itself is used occasionally for some meeting tech things apparently, but not the continualy hosting 5 days a week of tech meetups it was so loved for.
farazbabar 2y ago
I am in phoenix, it is summer right now so things are double dead but even in fall to spring months, I have tried to find tech meetups (my interests are c++, c99, java, distributed systems, data engineering and non generative AIML/infra) and I can’t find any activity in the 5th largest city in US. I have tried to host things myself but only my friends or coworkers showed up, where are my fellow passionates?
- kortilla 2y ago
  I think there are enough out there with the surge of Covid relocation population. Godaddy used to host some when I was briefly there for work in the early 2010s but the meetup.com tech community was definitely non-existent. I would have been very active if it wasn’t dead. Just need some catalyst to get it started. :)
monksy 2y ago
I would love to see this in Chicago. Unfortunately.. a lot of the wind got let out of the sails in the city for tech meetups during covid.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Make it happen! That's how these things work. People will show up. You just have to white-knuckle it through the first couple meetups and then they take on a life of their own.
Sparkyte 2y ago
They need to happen again for networking reasons. I feel a lot of businesses are starting to look at tech costs as a burden rather than an investment these programming meetups help keep discussions open. I suggest if a business plans to start a tech front they should come to these and learn.
pradn 2y ago
The NYC chapter of Papers We Love looks to be starting back up, after a gap of about a year and then two years before that. I think they're getting Datadog to host the events. They have a convenient office next to Penn Station. https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/ https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/
legerdemain 2y ago
I get that the title of the post is wildly overstated. The author mentions a couple of meetups he has organized or heard of. Calling that a "reawakening" is... well, maybe if the author specifically means the NYC tech scene. That said, damn I wish the meetup scene came back to South Bay, or even just SF, or anywhere at all within driving distance. I get that grad students organize a lot of mini-conferences, talk series, and forums with other grad students, but I'm not in grad school.
tooltower 2y ago
I'm interested in attending these in my area (SF South Bay). How should we discover similar meetups? Is there a place we should subscribe to?
speakspokespok 2y ago
Any good recommendations for Seattle area? Doesn’t have to be Seattle proper. I miss SLUG at North Seattle CC :(
weitendorf 2y ago
I think the worst part of "meetup culture" is that there's almost always a commercial angle that takes preference over the community angle. No shade to OP, but even though this is what pissed them off about their JS meetup, they're still doing it by having their speakers essentially pitch joining their engineering team. The other side of the coin is that default advice on the internet for getting a job as a developer used to include "go to local developer meetups", and as a founder/business, it's an obvious idea to see developer meetups as a potential marketing/recruiting channel. So a lot of attendees do actually want jobs, and a lot of speakers want to give people jobs. But will people stick around once they get that job? And is job-oriented content really what you want out of a meetup as a consistent attendee? I wonder if some combination of reading groups, a process to get regular attendees to present, and hackathons might create a more sustainable programming meetup culture. It can still be corporate funded (eg have it in their building or shout them out or cobrand or whatever) but the content could be a lot more interesting. It might not work for Javascript, but systems programming actually intersects with a lot of published research and has more of a hacker culture, so I think you could pull it off. Incidentally, I just acquired some office space in SF and might be interested in hosting one if I had enough interest and volunteers.
- kwillets 2y ago
  SF Papers We Love might be interested in a physical space -- we've been meeting online, but IMO we would benefit by face-to-face.
kwillets 2y ago
Papers We Love SF has been reconstituting lately; unfortunately I don't know if July has an event yet, but try https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/ https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/ . We've been meeting online, and I'm interested in setting up physical venues if anyone has one. The PWL Discord: https://discord.com/channels/1025104619975737446/1025104620558766166 https://discord.com/channels/1025104619975737446/10251046205...
peter_d_sherman 2y ago
Related: https://nycsystems.xyz/ https://nycsystems.xyz/
hieronymusN 2y ago
Just a heads up, but contrary to the article, the NYC Papers We Love meetup is back. https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/events/302129898/ https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/events/302129898/

392 points by paulgb 2y ago

convolvatron 2y ago

just tried to look - SF distributed systems meetup was a one-shot affair?

msgilligan 2y ago
I'm hoping that is not the case. I signed up in the hopes there will be more.
- convolvatron 2y ago
  I suppose we could meet at Lovejoy's tea room and talk about our favorite parts of the paxos paper

Aurornis 2y ago

> I used to attend a bunch of meetups before the pandemic. But I quickly got disillusioned. Almost every meetup was varying degrees of startups pitching their product. The last straw for me was sitting through a talk at a JavaScript meetup that was by a devrel employee of a startup who literally gave a tutorial for their product. My favorite local meetups fell to problems like this. It was easy to filter out the DevRel people trying to advertise. The hard problem was filtering out people who were only interested in presenting something so they could show another presentation on their resume or personal brand website, with no interest in engaging with the meetup. These people would want to only show up for the one meetup where they got to present. They’d present some simple content designed to make them look good, with little regard to educating or discussing things. They’d often have some excuse for needing to leave quickly after presenting, some times before any QA time. And they always needed a video recording of themselves speaking. For a while we had these to stream to remote viewers, but if the camera gear wasn’t available they’d panic and spend a lot of time improvising a way to record it with their phone even if delayed the presentation. Getting the recording of themselves speaking was the primary goal, not actually speaking to the group. After this happens enough times, the core members realize they’re being used as audience props for someone’s career advancement and they stop coming. The meetup collapses. I hope my local meetup groups can have a little resurgence like this where people are primarily interested in the meetup, not the self promotion opportunity.

tombert 2y ago
Yeah, it annoys me that a lot of functional programming stuff kind of fell into cryptocurrency startups. There definitely is interesting enough tech behind crypto, but a lot of these talks end up kind of devolving into why their product is amazing and better than all the other coins and why you should invest in their ICO.
- cachvico 2y ago
  Haskell?
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    Cardano?
  - tombert 2y ago
    Last meetup I saw it was an OCaml meetup.
atmosx 2y ago
Communities without some kind of curation don't survive in the long run. That should be, historically at least, clear by now.
griftrejection 2y ago
The solution is simple: vet the talks, vet the presenter, and don't focus on technology that is popular for grifting. Sorry, but I've been to enough JS/TS meetups to know what's happening. But that world is full of marketing and people who want funding. Compare this to a BSD meetup or a 2600 meetup. Nobody's trying to sell you stuff there.
1oooqooq 2y ago
this is a problem of the job market. most celebrated talks are from people well employed for life so they can talk shit at some system or protocol. from upnp to the persistent compiler worm talks. those folks didn't expect to depend on their resume padding every 3 to 8 months to live. likewise the people organizing the talks didn't depends on the status sending devRel people to expect sponsors. this is exactly what doctorow is yapping about lately. but everyone only accept small points of the big picture.

screye 2y ago

I'm surprised that universities don't open their doors to such events for everyone. 'Systems' is fairly industry-focused. So, academia-industry partnerships on seminars seems like a great idea. It's a shame (and imo, mind boggling) that SF proper doesn't have a tier 1 university. While Stanford and Berkeley are very close, the lack of a grounding institution makes SF culture feel 'dispersed'.

mechanicker 2y ago
Would love UC Berkeley to revive innovation and collaboration as seen during the BSD days.
- musicale 2y ago
  So RISC-V isn't enough for you? ;-) More seriously, it does seem like there were a number of interesting systems research and development collaborations in the 1980s: BSD at Berkeley, Athena at MIT, Andrew at CMU, etc. Currently it seems like the interest, funding, opportunities, and incentives for academic researchers are largely for short-term projects and AI/ML rather than long-term, ongoing systems projects. The modern funding and publishing landscape seems to emphasize speed and quantity over quality and impact. Moreover, it seems that companies with deep pockets (Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia) may be less likely to collaborate with and/or fund academic projects as IBM and DEC did in the 1980s. It could be that those partnerships weren't hugely beneficial for AT&T, IBM and DEC's businesses.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  eXperimental Computing Facility isn't enough for you?
weinzierl 2y ago
The mentioned TUMuchdata is held at an university. I think a lot depends on the individuals behind such activities. I don't know anyone behind TUMuchdata and had no contact to the department for years but the chair is still the same as when I studied there and I think he might be exactly the person that would permit or even foster such activities.

weinzierl 2y ago

> First off, don't pay for anything yourself. Find a company who will host. At the same time, don't feel the need to give in too much to the demands of the company. Or go the same route as the mentioned TUMuchdata[1] which apparently kicked off the activities in the post. They are simply meeting at their university. I know at least one Rust Meetup near them, that deliberately decided to meet at the public library (with permission) and forgo any company sponsorships. [1] The pun here is that TUM is the common abbreviation for Technical University Munich.

mzinsmeister 2y ago
We are very lucky to have both the university to host our weekly events and also to have Alex Petrov on our side who is very well connected to all kinds of companies and helps us a lot in finding venues for our Munich Database Meetup which we only organize once every 1-2 months or so.

walterbell 2y ago

> I started feeling a bit embarrassed that a graduate student had more guts than I had to get back onto the meetup organizer wagon. Inter-generational perpetual embarrassment engine for innovation.

demondemidi 2y ago

Meetup.com was on fire with maker, programming, and tech meetups in Portland in 2010-2014. Some were huge (I recall the auditorium for Puppet Labs wall-to-wall one point). Then ... poof. All gone, even before the pandemic. And it was super diverse topics: everything from NodeJS & Rust, and HTML1.0 to startups, manufacturing, and IoT hacking: heck, there was meetup for RF circuit enthusiasts! I just checked and there's still CTRL-H going strong, but not much else. From what I heard from two regular organizers is that it is just a LOT of work to run a consistently solid meetup, and eventually exhausting. I can see that: I remember thinking, "I could help but do I really want to use my small amount of free time for this?" So, hats off to people who ran those awesome meetups (Thubten, I'm looking at you!).

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Exhausting plus everyone has to make a meetup account plus meetup started charging more and more plus why not just use Facebook since I'm the only one without a Facebook account Maybe a federated alternative will take off soon. It would be nice if email was federated in practice
- shagie 2y ago
  https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilizon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilizon ) Also from a few days ago - Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398
walterbell 2y ago
> Meetup.com was on fire with maker, programming, and tech meetups in Portland in 2010-2014. Some were huge (I recall the auditorium for Puppet Labs wall-to-wall one point). Then ... poof. All gone, even before the pandemic. [2017] Acquired by WeWork [2018] Founder steps down as CEO [2019] New pricing model [2020] WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp [2024] Bending Spoons announced it will acquire Meetup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup

sausajez 2y ago

Strange you say this, I just got together with a bunch of people and revived an old user group that I used to run, seems like there's a itch to get out and socialise again

billfor 2y ago

The old DECUS meetings were fun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECUS

shae 2y ago

Who's up for one in Boston? I'll organize if I can find some speakers.

kaizoku20 2y ago
+1
rahuldave 2y ago
Count me in on organizing as well. And not just for systems but ml/llm adjacent infra and databases as well. Things like arrow and lancedb for example
tstack 2y ago
There’s a handmade meetup in Boston you might want to check out — https://handmadecities.com/meetups/ https://handmadecities.com/meetups/
otras 2y ago
Just the other day, I was checking to see if there were any active ones in the Boston area. I'd definitely be up for one, and I'd be more than happy to do a talk and/or help organize.
Zambyte 2y ago
I go to a Linux User Group meetup at Lowell Makes[0] on the 2nd and 4th Thursday. You don't have to be a member of the makerspace to join, but it is a very nice resource :) Our meetups have been very casual, just hanging out with some laptops, sometimes with pizza and beer. We tend to just talk about projects we think are cool, and things we're working on or learning. https://lowellmakes.spaces.nexudus.com/events/1415349776/linux-user-group-at-lowell-makes-membersguests https://lowellmakes.spaces.nexudus.com/events/1415349776/lin... Also I am the "Robby" on the "contact..." line, so if you have questions feel free to direct them at me :D [0] https://lowellmakes.com/ https://lowellmakes.com/

__turbobrew__ 2y ago

I was on the board of directors for a local Linux Users Group and can echo the difficulties in finding a venue. In a city full of empty office spaces on a weekday night it was virtually impossible to find a stable meeting location. Without a stable meeting location you are much less likely to establish a core group since people do not like to have to learn how to get to different venues. Mozilla hosted us at one point but the political tides changed there and we got kicked out. I think having strong buy in from someone in the C-suite of a company is the only real way to do it. Otherwise you are beholden to the changing winds of the company. In the end we are now in a stable location in the local library, but only because we had someone on the inside. Previously when we approached the library we were stone walled without someone to grease the wheels. I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. In many locations you can no longer pool some money with your buddies to buy a piece of land to build your clubhouse on. In my city there are many such clubs which were formed 50 years ago — the sailing club, the badminton club, the lawn bowling club, etc — but land is too scarce in many places now and we need the municipalities to pick up the slack.

packetlost 2y ago
> I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. I never realized this was something that was needed so bad, but yeah. In my city we have a bunch of privately owned venues that you can rent, but the cost ranges from reasonable to very not reasonable. To be fair, a lot of my local technical meetups just hang out at one of the quieter restaurant/bars in the area and it seems to work ok for them. The downside is you don't have any way to present anything. Another group I regularly go to is a local DefCon chapter that rents out space above a "barcade" (arcade + bar) and aside from being a bit hot in the summer, the vibes are great and the community doubly so.
- bonestamp2 2y ago
  I know some groups meet at a city library (many of them have meeting rooms that can be booked for free or for a small fee). We had this same problem and ended up starting a (non-profit) makerspace where we now host several meetups. It's win/win really. We are all about building community and bringing people together with similar interests is a great way to do that. It has also helped us get more paying members.

torontopizza 2y ago

I started a Toronto meetup with people here on HN and the Fediverse. Running a stable IRL meetup is a lot of work!

kewbish 2y ago
Curious if you have a link to your event page?
- devdao 2y ago
  Toronto's Tech Pizza Mondays https://social.linux.pizza/@Techpizzamondays https://social.linux.pizza/@Techpizzamondays If you're here, you belong and you are invited and welcome

toyg 2y ago

> although 60 people say Yes initially, by the time of the event we have typically gotten about 50 people in attendance That's actually pretty good. Most free events (of any kind) will typically see attendance rates around 30-50% of RSVPs.

mattrighetti 2y ago

I recently moved to London and I wanted to start participating in these kind of events, where’s the best place to look for them?

paulgb 2y ago
I haven’t been to one yet, but from afar I hear great things about the London Future of Coding meetups.
mgaunard 2y ago
There are regular C++ meetups, which I expect would cover systems programming. It seems however cloud/web people have a different idea of what systems programming is.
- twic 2y ago
  Is that ACCU, or someone else now?
  - mgaunard 2y ago
    ACCU London is not very active anymore, I think CppLondon pretty much took over (it was the same guy as the CppOnSea conference, but I think he started asking other people to arrange it now). I don't know if it's that great these days, but it's a meetup I used to present at in the past, and I remember having fun getting beers with attendees afterwards.
normie3000 2y ago
A decade ago meetup.com was the place to look - if you wanted you could have gone to a different meet up every night, from Linux user group, python testing group, London Java community etc. It seems like some of these are still active on meetup.com, so that might be a good starting point.
harry_ord 2y ago
Been ages for me. Only London one I attended was the perl mongers meet ups but those were drinking based.

vsgherzi 2y ago

Ive been struggling to find good meetups in the san diego los angeles area. meetup.com seems pretty dead.. any suggestions?

john-tells-all 2y ago
Los Angeles area: - OWASP security meetup: this is great! Hosted at a WeWork or a local company. Great stuff. I'm not sure their funding model, but it's working. https://www.meetup.com/owasp-los-angeles/ https://www.meetup.com/owasp-los-angeles/ - Socal Python: we haven't found good venues that support talks so... the meetings are more social hours. This is fine. https://www.meetup.com/socalpython/ https://www.meetup.com/socalpython/ - LA DevOps: only one physical meeting so far. The bar let us show slides in a nice patio in the back, but it was so loud I couldn't hear. I hope they'll find a better venue. https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-ZZQWJLTm/ https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-ZZQWJLTm/ I'd love to start giving talks again, on "Fast Development" and organizational topics, but have prioritized my job for the moment. Ah well.
ZephyrP 2y ago
The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see something like it again. If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.

zeristor 2y ago

In London there was Skillsmatter's Code Node. Skillsmatter had trouble getting continued funding, however CodeNode itself is used occasionally for some meeting tech things apparently, but not the continualy hosting 5 days a week of tech meetups it was so loved for.

farazbabar 2y ago

I am in phoenix, it is summer right now so things are double dead but even in fall to spring months, I have tried to find tech meetups (my interests are c++, c99, java, distributed systems, data engineering and non generative AIML/infra) and I can’t find any activity in the 5th largest city in US. I have tried to host things myself but only my friends or coworkers showed up, where are my fellow passionates?

kortilla 2y ago
I think there are enough out there with the surge of Covid relocation population. Godaddy used to host some when I was briefly there for work in the early 2010s but the meetup.com tech community was definitely non-existent. I would have been very active if it wasn’t dead. Just need some catalyst to get it started. :)

monksy 2y ago

I would love to see this in Chicago. Unfortunately.. a lot of the wind got let out of the sails in the city for tech meetups during covid.

tptacek 2y ago
Make it happen! That's how these things work. People will show up. You just have to white-knuckle it through the first couple meetups and then they take on a life of their own.

Sparkyte 2y ago

They need to happen again for networking reasons. I feel a lot of businesses are starting to look at tech costs as a burden rather than an investment these programming meetups help keep discussions open. I suggest if a business plans to start a tech front they should come to these and learn.

pradn 2y ago

The NYC chapter of Papers We Love looks to be starting back up, after a gap of about a year and then two years before that. I think they're getting Datadog to host the events. They have a convenient office next to Penn Station. https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/ https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/

legerdemain 2y ago

I get that the title of the post is wildly overstated. The author mentions a couple of meetups he has organized or heard of. Calling that a "reawakening" is... well, maybe if the author specifically means the NYC tech scene. That said, damn I wish the meetup scene came back to South Bay, or even just SF, or anywhere at all within driving distance. I get that grad students organize a lot of mini-conferences, talk series, and forums with other grad students, but I'm not in grad school.

tooltower 2y ago

I'm interested in attending these in my area (SF South Bay). How should we discover similar meetups? Is there a place we should subscribe to?

speakspokespok 2y ago

Any good recommendations for Seattle area? Doesn’t have to be Seattle proper. I miss SLUG at North Seattle CC :(

weitendorf 2y ago

I think the worst part of "meetup culture" is that there's almost always a commercial angle that takes preference over the community angle. No shade to OP, but even though this is what pissed them off about their JS meetup, they're still doing it by having their speakers essentially pitch joining their engineering team. The other side of the coin is that default advice on the internet for getting a job as a developer used to include "go to local developer meetups", and as a founder/business, it's an obvious idea to see developer meetups as a potential marketing/recruiting channel. So a lot of attendees do actually want jobs, and a lot of speakers want to give people jobs. But will people stick around once they get that job? And is job-oriented content really what you want out of a meetup as a consistent attendee? I wonder if some combination of reading groups, a process to get regular attendees to present, and hackathons might create a more sustainable programming meetup culture. It can still be corporate funded (eg have it in their building or shout them out or cobrand or whatever) but the content could be a lot more interesting. It might not work for Javascript, but systems programming actually intersects with a lot of published research and has more of a hacker culture, so I think you could pull it off. Incidentally, I just acquired some office space in SF and might be interested in hosting one if I had enough interest and volunteers.

kwillets 2y ago
SF Papers We Love might be interested in a physical space -- we've been meeting online, but IMO we would benefit by face-to-face.

kwillets 2y ago

Papers We Love SF has been reconstituting lately; unfortunately I don't know if July has an event yet, but try https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/ https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/ . We've been meeting online, and I'm interested in setting up physical venues if anyone has one. The PWL Discord: https://discord.com/channels/1025104619975737446/1025104620558766166 https://discord.com/channels/1025104619975737446/10251046205...

peter_d_sherman 2y ago

Related: https://nycsystems.xyz/ https://nycsystems.xyz/

hieronymusN 2y ago

Just a heads up, but contrary to the article, the NYC Papers We Love meetup is back. https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/events/302129898/ https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/events/302129898/