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Ive been struggling to find good meetups in the san diego los angeles area. meetup.com seems pretty dead.. any suggestions?
If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.
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 not familiar with LA traffic and transit, but I would not be surprised if it took way longer to get to UCLA from the LA City Hall than to Cal from SF's. It's harder to walk there though, at least until 2030.[1]
It's true that SF culture is dispersed, but that's sort of intentional, a hyper-local city of neighborhoods.
[1] https://oaklandside.org/2022/12/20/bay-bridge-bike-path-on-t...
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.
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 poin…
I help run the Boulder Ruby meetup ( https://boulder-ruby.org/ ). We survived covid, having to move venues multiple times, and the declining sexiness of Ruby. Thanks so much to our sponsors Mojotech (for space and drinks) and Github (for zoom). We're still looking for other sponsors for pizza support--if you are in the Boulder area and are interested, please reach out.
The meetup is smaller than it was pre-covid, but it is still a great community. We have newer members, one time visitors (often from a bootcamp, looking for work) and regulars. It's a good mix, and the social chatting before the talks are one of the grat . I actually have enjoyed having a zoom option (for when you can't get to the meetup or to pull in speakers from out of town with no budget), but the in-person experience is far better.
I wrote up some tips for wrangling speakers here: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3283 because that is what I focused on. It's actually fun to reach out to folks and offer up the opportunity to speak. I never had problems with devrels doing talks, myself, as long as it was super clear that it wasn't a vendor pitch, but rather a discussion of some technical issue. (I was a devrel, so maybe that is why it didn't bother me?) But having a required corp speaker is a clear no-go for me.
That's a bummer your library was an obstacle. I worry a bit about mandates because many meetups are not formal non-profits. The best thing to do is to keep costs low and look for companies who recognize the value in fostering community. They're out there! Consulting companies are good options because of their business model :) .
We still use meetup.com because inertia, but the recent price increases makes it seem like it got acquired by Broadcom. We'll be exploring alternatives, but want to make sure our pages don't get taken over by a squatter. (I've heard about that happening with other meetups.)
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 poin…
Even when a company offers meeting space, they can be overbearing about it. I was involved a tiny bit in reviving a local interest group of high-powered programmers. Another person, who did all the actual hard work, of meeting organizing, got meeting space at a Big Tech company... Unfortunately, as a Big Tech (and in the surveillance capialism space), it was complete with signing in with security in the lobby, gettin…
how many Watts did you require for the meet up?
Is there a place we should subscribe to?
> 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 guess the easiest way to stop that would be to ask everyone who wants to present to come to at least one meetup before they do so. Would filter these folks out real quick.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 2024 Japan you could also just buy a house for 10k USD and call it your club house :p
True, but you’d have to travel for hours to get there, which makes it kinda inconvenient unless you want to have a permanent club meeting.
I miss SLUG at North Seattle CC :(