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A few ideas. 1) Try to be more selective with the meetups you attend. Particularly, meetups focused around a programming language or a specific technology (Pyt

by alook 14y ago

A few ideas. 1) Try to be more selective with the meetups you attend. Particularly, meetups focused around a programming language or a specific technology (Python/Hadoop/Node.js/etc) are likely to have more dedicated technical attendees. Bonus points if the meetup doesn't allow vendors/recruiters - that generally means that they like to keep the conversations focused on technology, rather than sales or job offers. 2) Hackathons. It's often encouraged to show up without an idea, form a team, and work on an idea for 24-48 hours. This is a great way to test-drive a partnership with someone who you might invite to work on a side-project. Chances are, by the end of the hackathon, there's mutual respect/trust among team members; the bonds you form by hacking together for a day or two are going to be far more conducive to working on new projects than the bond between you and your twitter followers. 3) Open-source projects. Pick an open-source project that you find particularly interesting. Sign up for the developer and user mailing lists, ask questions and answer them where you can. If you ask the developers where a good place to start helping out is, they'll often give you some easy ways to help out (improving logging / documentation / code style is often an easy first patch). Hope this helps!

sfard 14y ago
This is very helpful, thank you. I never thought of going to hackathons or helping on open source projects.
gvb 14y ago
[A]nswer [questions] where you can. - especially this. Most questions can be answered fairly readily with some research in the code. This is triply beneficial: 1. You learn a lot more about the code by directed research than by random or linear reading. 2. You will earn respect and a good reputation on the list, assuming you do good research. 3. When you are wrong, someone will correct you http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/ and both you and the original questioner will learn from that. Ironically, I've found quite often a question will go unanswered for days, but when I post an answer it often stimulates others to respond with clarifications, expansions, and corrections that they otherwise would not have posted.

by alook 14y ago

sfard 14y ago

This is very helpful, thank you. I never thought of going to hackathons or helping on open source projects.

gvb 14y ago

[A]nswer [questions] where you can. - especially this. Most questions can be answered fairly readily with some research in the code. This is triply beneficial: 1. You learn a lot more about the code by directed research than by random or linear reading. 2. You will earn respect and a good reputation on the list, assuming you do good research. 3. When you are wrong, someone will correct you http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/ and both you and the original questioner will learn from that. Ironically, I've found quite often a question will go unanswered for days, but when I post an answer it often stimulates others to respond with clarifications, expansions, and corrections that they otherwise would not have posted.