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A reawakening of systems programming meetups

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Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#71

Post by bboygravity »

Aeolun wrote: post #59
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #33

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 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.

In 2024 Japan you could also just buy a house for 10k USD and call it your club house :p

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#72

Post by demondemidi »

walterbell wrote: post #23
demondemidi wrote: post #19

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…

> 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. [2017] Acquired by WeWork [2018] Founder steps down as CEO [2019] New pricing model [2020] WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp [2024] Bending Spoons announced it will acquire Meetup https://en.wikipedia.…

That explains it! Son of a b....

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#73

Post by bboygravity »

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…

Counter point: I've been to Filipino meetups (Raid the fridge) where companies (even traditional/established banks) presented new products and services they'd been trying to launch mixed in with some company history.

They'd talk about the tech used, the difficulties (tech, business, legal, market) encountered and how they worked around those.

It was definitely more than just a sales pitch even when there was some of that at times. A mix of business stories, engineering, R&D stories, law, finance and general company and even country history.

I found it fascinating and overal great. To the point where it felt like a night out to enjoy entertainment. Not just the talks but the social meetup part of it as well. Maybe its a cultural thing, but I found companies there refreshingly open and honest about the way things had gone.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#74

Post by 1oooqooq »

1oooqooq wrote: post #31
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…

this is a problem of the job market. most celebrated talks are from people well employed for life so they can talk shit at some system or protocol. from upnp to the persistent compiler worm talks. those folks didn't expect to depend on their resume padding every 3 to 8 months to live. likewise the people organizing the talks didn't depends on the status sending devRel people to expect sponsors. this is exactly what d…

* startups sending devRel

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#75

Post by mgaunard »

twic wrote: post #65
mgaunard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that ACCU, or someone else now?

ACCU London is not very active anymore, I think CppLondon pretty much took over (it was the same guy as the CppOnSea conference, but I think he started asking other people to arrange it now).

I don't know if it's that great these days, but it's a meetup I used to present at in the past, and I remember having fun getting beers with attendees afterwards.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#76

Post by mzinsmeister »

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.

Just to clarify some stuff here (from an actual TUMuchData management team member):

The form is not really relevant for our events, it's just to support us. Since we have made the decision of being a MUNICH BASED IN PERSON club to get the maximum networking and social experience, we also wanted to make sure our actual club members will fulfill these criteria. That's why we have the paper form in person policy.

There will be some member-only events but those are more social events or maybe ones with very limited spots but usually access to events will be public.

Our events are not exclusively on the Garching campus. As you already found out we have two major formats:

1. The weekly paper reading group which is mostly researchers (mostly PhD students, sometimes professors) presenting their research or a single paper. Some weeks we have industry talks instead. These events are in Garching and only during the lecture period because they are mostly targeted towards students (we are a student club after all) so that they can learn more about the very relevant database research that is happening at TUM and how it's applied in industry.

2. Monthy or bi-monthy Munich Database Meetups which are more targeted towards industry and bringing together industry, students and researchers from academia. Those events will usually have more than one talk unlike our weekly events, the talks will mostly have speakers from industry (usually 2). They will usually be somewhere in the city center of Munich to make sure industry people will get there easier. We usually try to get some location at some company. We already had them at CodeCentric, Google and JetBrains.

For both formats we try to make sure we get deep technical talks about mostly database systems internals. For the research talks they are usually very deeply technical anyway and for the industry talks (including meetups) we are working on guidelines to make sure they know what type of talk we expect.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#77

Post by mzinsmeister »

weinzierl wrote: post #6

> First off, don't pay for anything yourself. Find a company who will host. At the same time, don't feel the need to give in too much to the demands of the company. Or go the same route as the mentioned TUMuchdata[1] which apparently kicked off the activities in the post. They are simply meeting at their university. I know at least one Rust Meetup near them, that deliberately decided to meet at the public library (wi…

We are very lucky to have both the university to host our weekly events and also to have Alex Petrov on our side who is very well connected to all kinds of companies and helps us a lot in finding venues for our Munich Database Meetup which we only organize once every 1-2 months or so.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#78

Post by mzinsmeister »

weinzierl wrote: post #9
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'.

The mentioned TUMuchdata is held at an university. I think a lot depends on the individuals behind such activities. I don't know anyone behind TUMuchdata and had no contact to the department for years but the chair is still the same as when I studied there and I think he might be exactly the person that would permit or even foster such activities.

While we get a lot of support from all three database related chairs at TUM we like to highlight that we are an independent non-profit initiated, founded and run exclusively by students (which includes PhD students like me by now). We were founded with the main mission of making sure normal bachelors and masters CS students know about the high quality database research at TUM with projects like HyPer and now Umbra.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#79

Post by bsder »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #33

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 was on the board of directors for a local Linux Users Group and can echo the difficulties in finding a venue.

While venues are difficult, don't overlook the added complications that are caused by insurance.

A lot of "venues" want you to show that you are carrying liability insurance. That means you have to be an actual 501(c)3 along with a bank account.

Re: A reawakening of systems programming meetups

#80

Post by diffxx »

__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 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.

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