A reawakening of systems programming meetups

> 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.

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'.

> 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.

> I'm surprised that universities don't open their doors to such events for everyone

You have to be very careful about letting people use your facilities to host events.

Unfortunately, grifters will use any opportunity to do something on a university campus as a way to imply they are associated with the university.

Even self-help author Tim Ferriss recommended this trick in his “Four Hour Work Week” book: He advised using university campuses to speak so you could leverage their credibility for your brand (I can’t remember the exact details)

It became such a problem that universities really can’t risk letting random groups come use their facilities. It doesn’t take long before someone abuses it to say they “Lectured at ” or “Gave a speech at ”

The mentioned TUMuchdata requires a signed form, in German, handed over in person (not email) to join their community.

I think this is not required to just attend one of their events. The events are at the university campus which is quite off, and makes it relatively inconvenient to get there if you are not at the university anyway.

So, I guess they found a viable filter.