I recently moved to London and I wanted to start participating in these kind of events, where’s the best place to look for them?
Been ages for me. Only London one I attended was the perl mongers meet ups but those were drinking based.
A reawakening of systems programming meetups
131–140 of 162 posts
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience $20-$70 an hour is too much. We were offered $50/hour meeting space at a local incubator, but the numbers never added up. It is hard enough to get people to show up if it is free, requiring people to pay to attend a casual meetup would not work in our situation. Who is going to foot the multi thousand dollar per year bill for meeting space? This is why municipalities need to provide this space for fr…
Why should my tax dollars pay for your special interest group to have free meetups? How would we distribute access to this newly created resource equitably? I don't disagree with the concept, but it gets hairy in the particulars. The problem is that of course we rarely ever get to vote on issues such as "should we build a community meeting space?" so we never really get to understand how the electorate truly feels.
> Why should my tax dollars pay for your special interest group to have free meetups?
Why should your tax dollars pay education, healthcare, police, road repairs, etc? Because the society will be better off and you live in a society.
The education of a child your taxes pay for will pay off exponentially when this kid becomes a professional.
The meeting space your taxes pay could facilitate the creation of the next revolutionary software tech.
Taxes should be considered an investment that pays off not financially but by improving your life overall.
> How would we distribute access to this newly created resource equitably?
A bookable calendar and a maximum amount of monthly bookable slots per organization. Nothing revolutionary really.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience $20-$70 an hour is too much. We were offered $50/hour meeting space at a local incubator, but the numbers never added up. It is hard enough to get people to show up if it is free, requiring people to pay to attend a casual meetup would not work in our situation. Who is going to foot the multi thousand dollar per year bill for meeting space? This is why municipalities need to provide this space for fr…
The other solution is to get sponsors. In return for paying $50 a month (or whatever), they get to put a representative in front of a group of people for five minutes to pitch heir products. Or maybe they pay for the food at a place where you have a separate sponsor for the venue. This is much the same way that DevOpsDays and other similar conferences are operated, just on a smaller scale of a few hours instead of a…
Just the thing meetups needed, corporate ads.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. I never realized this was something that was needed so bad, but yeah. In my city we have a bunch of privately owned venues that you can rent , but the cost ranges from reasonable to very not reasonable. To be fair, a lot of my local technical meetups just hang out at one of the qu…
I know some groups meet at a city library (many of them have meeting rooms that can be booked for free or for a small fee). We had this same problem and ended up starting a (non-profit) makerspace where we now host several meetups. It's win/win really. We are all about building community and bringing people together with similar interests is a great way to do that. It has also helped us get more paying members.
Most of my local libraries close fairly early these days, I think the latest any of them are open is 8:00 pm. Because of that, the 7-8 pm time slot is popular and rooms get filled up pretty fast.
I recently found out that there's a local group for the 2600 Hacker Quarterly magazine that meets at the same Barnes and Noble cafe that my book club meets at monthly. They're open until 9:00 pm, which (in the case of the book club) gives ample time to talk about the books we just read, vote on upcoming books, and catch up on events in the area. If everyone has something to contribute, we can easily fill 2 hours of time.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#135I 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…
There's a local developer meetup group in my hometown, a town which doesn't have a lot of local developers, ban me for essentially disagreeing with them in a private Discord DM. My crime? Telling them I don't like my hometown (and possibly for being the only known gay person). Meanwhile, their group's amenities are tax payer funded and allows their publicly funded power trips because they found someone to "grease the…
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences, but I don't think some huge bureaucratic red tape will be any better. What will happen is that all the toxic assholes who will rant, make creepy remarks, etc. won't be told to buzz off, because doing the whole third party auditing will be too much effort and costly.
And I also think it's fine to exclude people for subjective reasons, even if it's (marginally) "tax-funded". If you go to the JS meetup and keep complaining about how bad JS is then maybe it's best that you stop coming. Generally very contrarian and combative? Maybe it's best those people also stop coming.
People that go to Sunday mass to proselytize that God doesn't exist (or to an atheist meetup to proselytize that God does exist) are also not welcome. Saying "it's tax-funded, and therefore it should be open to all" would lead to absurdity.
In the end we have to accept that not everything is perfect, and that trying to achieve 100% fairness typically makes things worse.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#136I think the worst part of "meetup culture" is that there's almost always a commercial angle that takes preference over the community angle. No shade to OP, but even though this is what pissed them off about their JS meetup, they're still doing it by having their speakers essentially pitch joining their engineering team. The other side of the coin is that default advice on the internet for getting a job as a developer…
SF Papers We Love might be interested in a physical space -- we've been meeting online, but IMO we would benefit by face-to-face.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#137Papers We Love SF has been reconstituting lately; unfortunately I don't know if July has an event yet, but try https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/ .
We've been meeting online, and I'm interested in setting up physical venues if anyone has one.
The PWL Discord: https://discord.com/channels/1025104619975737446/10251046205...
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#138I 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 was…
But then what is a "community group" if not that?
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#139Meetup.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…
I would love to attend a systems-oriented meetup in Portland, and would be willing to organize/operate it though I’m quite bad at that kind of thing.
If you add contact info to your profile, I will reach out. Or feel free to send me a note.
Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> it was complete with signing in with security in the lobby, getting a guest badge for the visit This doesn't sound unreasonable to me if you were using a private companies space. The company providing the floor space and security. Sure there may be easier venues but I wouldn't expect less than this if I was going to be using a company's boardroom for my meeting space.
> doesn't sound unreasonable [...] if you were using a private companies space
I've seen meetups, hosted by Amazon in Boston IIRC, where upon exiting the elevator, you were unexpectedly required to sign an NDA-ish contract in order to leave the vestibule. Now preregistration deadlines, signing in/out, license capture, headshots, and NDAs, aren't necessarily unreasonable for a company. Nor bag searches, nor surrendering electronics to lockers. But as expectations diverge, between "private companies space" and "I'm just here for a room of conversation and pizza", the energy barrier to attending, discomfort, and absence, may increase. Microsoft Boston in contrast, was built with access-control elevators and a floor of conference rooms, and so could provide "just name the meetup at the desk and go up".