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A reawakening of systems programming meetups

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Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#11

Post by tombert »

Aurornis wrote: post #2

> 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 DevR…

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.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#12

Post by musicale »

mechanicker wrote: post #5
screye wrote: post #4

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'.

Would love UC Berkeley to revive innovation and collaboration as seen during the BSD days.

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.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#13

Post by Aurornis »

weinzierl wrote: post #10
Aurornis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

My closest community college allows venue rentals. The filter is that few people think it’s prestigious to speak at the local community college.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#14

Post by cachvico »

tombert wrote: post #11
Aurornis wrote: post #2

> 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 DevR…

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.

Haskell?

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#15

Post by WanderPanda »

weinzierl wrote: post #10
Aurornis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Also that level of hustle is not (yet) common in Germany I believe

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#16

Post by musicale »

screye wrote: post #4

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'.

Many universities have seminars that are open to the public, online or/and in person.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#17

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

cachvico wrote: post #14
tombert wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haskell?

Cardano?

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#18

Post by musicale »

Aurornis wrote: post #8
screye wrote: post #4

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'.

> 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…

Many US universities seem happy to rent out their facilities over the summer, but you have to pay.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#19

Post by demondemidi »

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!).

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#20

Post by atmosx »

Aurornis wrote: post #2

> 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 DevR…

Communities without some kind of curation don't survive in the long run. That should be, historically at least, clear by now.
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