Ask HN: How can I meet other programmers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I meet other programmers?

14 pointspiratelogic9 comments

I've recently moved to Jacksonville, FL and I'd like to meet some fellow developers. The city I lived in before moving to Jacksonville had virtually no tech community so this isn't an opportunity I've been exposed to.

Here in Jacksonville there are a few programming meetups (the biggest being RubyJax, organized by Hashrocket), but my experience has all been in Python and there isn't much of a Python community as far as I can tell.

I have a real desire to become a better programmer but, without anyone to talk shop with, it's a lonely venture. Where can I look to meet fellow coders?

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Before I found a python user group in Minneapolis, I had only heard about the Ruby user group. So, I installed ruby, made sure I could run

  >> puts "Hello world"

and then went to the Ruby meetup. It was a good call. At the time I really just needed someone to talk shop with and no one there cared that I was mainly a Python dev. It's not like we talked about block scoping and multi-lined lambdas.

One huge benefit of going to the Ruby meetup was that I learned of a bunch of other meetups in the area. Smaller ones that didn't have a web presence yet. There may be a Python community in Jacksonville that some Ruby users might know about.

Go on LinkedIn and try to add some other developers who seem like they would be the type of person who goes to meetups. I did this before and got some suggestions for places to go (a co-working type of environment) that I hadn't heard of before. It ended up being pretty far from where I actually lived so I never made it out there (busy with work, commute, etc) but it was nice to at least have the option

I'd go to RubyJax and meet up with the Ruby programmers. You'll have a lot more in common with them than you will with Enterprise .NET or Java programmers. And who knows, you might find that you like Ruby too.

Start your own Python meetup group if there isn't one. I've started a couple different meetup groups over the years and sure it starts off slow but gradually it'll grow and people will find you.

Go to rubyjax. Chances are you'll meet people who also code python. Even if you don't, it'll probably be an interesting event anyway.

I was going to suggest a Jacksonville HN Meetup, but I looked on Meetup.com, and you appear to be right -- there's very little in your area. The nearest thing I saw was the Gainesville Web Meetup, but it only had 4 people attending and that's a hike for you.

You could always start a Jacksonville HN meetup, if only to find out how many others are in the area. Or you could start a poll on here and tweet the link to try to get it upvoted -- post the link back here if you do and I'll upvote it.

Another suggestion I was going to give you is to hit up a StartupWeekend - here's[1] one in Jacksonville, but I don't know how frequent they are in your area.

http://jacksonville.startupweekend.org/

Um, start a Meetup and Tweet about it? It'll cost $50.

I'm trying to get a job so I can buy a new hard drive for my laptop. It crashed. $50 isn't in the budget right now, but I do admit this is an idea I hadn't thought about.

I will definitely look into this in the future!

How about just tweeting about it?

Pick a known local place and tweet it.

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