Ive been struggling to find good meetups in the san diego los angeles area. meetup.com seems pretty dead.. any suggestions?
A reawakening of systems programming meetups
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Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#52I'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'.
Systems have been cleaved in two for who knows what purposes. Systems have always deserved a proper segregation from product, that's been lost in this new paradigm.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#53Who's up for one in Boston? I'll organize if I can find some speakers.
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.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#54Earlier 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?
Last meetup I saw it was an OCaml meetup.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#55I recently moved to London and I wanted to start participating in these kind of events, where’s the best place to look for them?
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.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#56I 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 poin…
> 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 ran into this sort of problem when trying to put together an explicitly non-profit tech meetup (talk about your projects, nothing commercial allowed, no cost to attend) at my local library; because I wasn't a "community group" but rather just somebody trying to assemble a loose group of individuals from around the Bay, they wouldn't let me do it.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#57I 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 poin…
That's what "community centers" are for! A town next to mine has one of those, and any town resident can rent a room for a reasonable amount of money ($20 to $70/hour depending on room size). So as long as at least one group member is from the right town, the room is guaranteed.
But unless you're going to ask for contributions, this means the organizers are footing the bill every time -- and in my opinion, once you start collecting money you've doubled the complexity.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#58just tried to look - SF distributed systems meetup was a one-shot affair?
I'm hoping that is not the case. I signed up in the hopes there will be more.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#59I 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 poin…
> I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups.
Japan has these. There’s local community centers basically everywhere which can be used as a meeting space for a token fee (I think it was like $5/hour last I checked). My local center in the middle of Tokyo is just three floors of rooms that people can use for whatever they need.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#60> 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…
I get what you, and other commenters here, are going for. But getting speakers is still hard in the first place. And as I mentioned in the post, I see high quality talks as 100% marketing. They're just marketing for your engineering team, rather than for your product. I think we'd have trouble attracting the high quality speakers we do today if we set restrictions some commenters have suggested such as attending the meetup multiple times, not mentioning the company, etc.
We're pretty picky with speakers we invite but also quite flexible once we've invited someone we think will be good. I think it's worked out pretty well for the audience and speakers. At least, that is what they all tell me.