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A reawakening of systems programming meetups

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Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#141

Post by generalizations »

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…

I wonder if a solution is not to try to contain the 'pressure', but to give it a release valve. Instead of trying to detect and push them out, give them a chance to say their piece and make their connections. If they have a reason to out themselves, then they can be contained.

HN does this too - you'll see the ads occasionally for startups, and we're all glad for the 'who is hiring' and 'who wants to be hired' threads. Those are likely containment as much as anything else.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#142

Post by theamk »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #67
theamk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 municipalities need to provide this space for free

They actually do! The town waives the fee if event "primarily serves town's community". You only pay if there are many out-of-towners whose their taxes don't pay for community center.

I didn't mention this in my original comment because it seems irrelevant in context of programming meetup - what are the chances most of the members would be all from the a single town?

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#143

Post by bezier-curve »

arp242 wrote: post #135
bezier-curve wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, I live in the bible belt, and I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case because one of their "board of directors" posted a homophobic tweet the same day I was banned. It's an example of how we shouldn't mandate hosting any "special interest" groups using tax dollars, which was the GP's point.

I was not challenging the sole purpose of the group as in your example, they simply retaliated for personal reasons irrelevant to the group's purpose, which is unprofessional. The group is about software development, not my hometown. The only reason I was even talking to their admins in DM is because they were harassing me with confrontational dialogue over a tasteful joke that went over their heads. It's a toxic group, and our public university shouldn't be hosting their events.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#145

Post by ghaff »

ossobuco wrote: post #133
bradknowles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of software meetups have a corporate sponsor--even if it's just to pay for pizza.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#146

Post by arp242 »

bezier-curve wrote: post #143
arp242 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, I live in the bible belt, and I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case because one of their "board of directors" posted a homophobic tweet the same day I was banned. It's an example of how we shouldn't mandate hosting any "special interest" groups using tax dollars, which was the GP's point. I was not challenging the sole purpose of the group as in your example, they simply retaliated for personal re…

> I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case

Well, maybe, and that sucks, but it also doesn't really matter. You're still burdening thousands if not tens of thousands of groups with a significant legislation and cumbersome procedure just because there's this one group in the bible belt that might be a bunch of jerks. You can't really legislate jerks away.

And regardless, I don't think public resources should only be available to "nice people", or "non-toxic groups" (whatever subjective meaning you can give to that). It really doesn't cost a lot of money to provide and manage some venue for public use, and "funded by tax dollars" is more of a hang-up than anything else. Tons of public resources are funded by tax dollars, from pavements to social services to the fire brigade. Jerks and groups that are a bunch of jerks have just as much right to use these resources as anyone else. This line of reasoning becomes pretty absurd fairly quickly.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#147

Post by bezier-curve »

arp242 wrote: post #146
bezier-curve wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I live in the bible belt, and I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case because one of their "board of directors" posted a homophobic tweet the same day I was banned. It's an example of how we shouldn't mandate hosting any "special interest" groups using tax dollars, which was the GP's point. I was not challenging the sole purpose of the group as in your example, they simply retaliated for personal re…

> I'm pretty certain it was discrimination in my case Well, maybe, and that sucks, but it also doesn't really matter. You're still burdening thousands if not tens of thousands of groups with a significant legislation and cumbersome procedure just because there's this one group in the bible belt that might be a bunch of jerks. You can't really legislate jerks away. And regardless, I don't think public resources should…

Well, I get the point you're trying to make but it seems a bit reductionist to compare discrimination against a legally protected status to whether or not "nice" people are using public resources. One instance is actually illegal, the other is not.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#148

Post by screye »

worstspotgain wrote: post #92
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'.

You can think of Cal as the non-med school portion of UCSF. We think of the East Bay as non-SF, but the perceived distance is mostly water psychology. If you glued Emeryville to the SF waterfront, it'd be way closer to downtown than SF State. 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…

No, Berkeley feels far.

Harvard, MIT, NYU, UW, UPenn, ETH Zurich, ICL, UCL...all are in the center of their respective cities. Even Cornell-Tech went out of its way to find a little island (literally) right by mid-town NYC.

Berkeley is situated similar to Stevens or Wellesley. They are close enough, but no one is going to go for an evening seminar to these locations on a weekday. NYU or MIT on the other hand, feel effortless to add to a commute back gome.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#149

Post by bradknowles »

ossobuco wrote: post #133
bradknowles wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The alternative may well be that the meetup in question simply ceases to exist.

Which is better? No meetup at all, or a meetup with sponsors?

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#150

Post by worstspotgain »

screye wrote: post #148
worstspotgain wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can think of Cal as the non-med school portion of UCSF. We think of the East Bay as non-SF, but the perceived distance is mostly water psychology. If you glued Emeryville to the SF waterfront, it'd be way closer to downtown than SF State. 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…

No, Berkeley feels far. Harvard, MIT, NYU, UW, UPenn, ETH Zurich, ICL, UCL...all are in the center of their respective cities. Even Cornell-Tech went out of its way to find a little island (literally) right by mid-town NYC. Berkeley is situated similar to Stevens or Wellesley. They are close enough, but no one is going to go for an evening seminar to these locations on a weekday. NYU or MIT on the other hand, feel ef…

Sure, but it's less than a factor of 2. As of right now, driving:

Seattle City Hall to UW: 12mins

Boston City Hall to Harvard Square: 14mins

LA City Hall to UCLA: 20mins (a bit cheating since it's 100% freeways)

SF City Hall to University & Oxford: 24mins

NY City Hall to Columbia: 27mins

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