I didn't make long lasting friendships at the university, and I don't want to join a big company just to make friend with other developers.
What do you think is the best way of fixing that? Ultimately, how did you meet your developer friends outside of university or work?
I've never met them in meat-space, but none of us see that as a problem, we spend most of our time at our machines and communicate mostly through text. Without the need to answer immediately our conversations are often deeper and slower, and we prefer this.
we communicate through whatsapp and slack, sometimes IRC but that's getting rarer
A really good way to meet a lot of developers is to organise a meetup.
Been taking time to go to these even though most are at terribly inconvenient times & days. Even in the city that never sleeps, I've had no dice with any of these. I've had more success with a Discord channel for .NET programmers than I have in going to real world meetups.