A reawakening of systems programming meetups

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 do believe that it should be a mandate for the municipality to provide meeting space for local non-profit and special interest groups. In many locations you can no longer pool some money with your buddies to buy a piece of land to build your clubhouse on. In my city there are many such clubs which were formed 50 years ago — the sailing club, the badminton club, the lawn bowling club, etc — but land is too scarce in many places now and we need the municipalities to pick up the slack.

My favorite local meetups fell to problems like this.

It was easy to filter out the DevRel people trying to advertise. The hard problem was filtering out people who were only interested in presenting something so they could show another presentation on their resume or personal brand website, with no interest in engaging with the meetup.

These people would want to only show up for the one meetup where they got to present. They’d present some simple content designed to make them look good, with little regard to educating or discussing things. They’d often have some excuse for needing to leave quickly after presenting, some times before any QA time.

And they always needed a video recording of themselves speaking. For a while we had these to stream to remote viewers, but if the camera gear wasn’t available they’d panic and spend a lot of time improvising a way to record it with their phone even if delayed the presentation. Getting the recording of themselves speaking was the primary goal, not actually speaking to the group.

After this happens enough times, the core members realize they’re being used as audience props for someone’s career advancement and they stop coming. The meetup collapses.

I hope my local meetup groups can have a little resurgence like this where people are primarily interested in the meetup, not the self promotion opportunity.

'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'.

That's actually pretty good. Most free events (of any kind) will typically see attendance rates around 30-50% of RSVPs.

From what I heard from two regular organizers is that it is just a LOT of work to run a consistently solid meetup, and eventually exhausting. I can see that: I remember thinking, "I could help but do I really want to use my small amount of free time for this?" So, hats off to people who ran those awesome meetups (Thubten, I'm looking at you!).

The other side of the coin is that default advice on the internet for getting a job as a developer used to include "go to local developer meetups", and as a founder/business, it's an obvious idea to see developer meetups as a potential marketing/recruiting channel. So a lot of attendees do actually want jobs, and a lot of speakers want to give people jobs. But will people stick around once they get that job? And is job-oriented content really what you want out of a meetup as a consistent attendee?

I wonder if some combination of reading groups, a process to get regular attendees to present, and hackathons might create a more sustainable programming meetup culture. It can still be corporate funded (eg have it in their building or shout them out or cobrand or whatever) but the content could be a lot more interesting. It might not work for Javascript, but systems programming actually intersects with a lot of published research and has more of a hacker culture, so I think you could pull it off. Incidentally, I just acquired some office space in SF and might be interested in hosting one if I had enough interest and volunteers.

Running a stable IRL meetup is a lot of work!

https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/

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...

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 (with permission) and forgo any company sponsorships.

[1] The pun here is that TUM is the common abbreviation for Technical University Munich.

Inter-generational perpetual embarrassment engine for innovation.

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 miss SLUG at North Seattle CC :(

Is there a place we should subscribe to?