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Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.

Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.

Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.

Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.

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> If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.

I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!

I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.

In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.

Yeah, the cost of facilities is real. The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one. Unfortunately that would be pretty much impossible here without support from a huge tech company or something.

Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.

> The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one

Oh, I'm not familiar with that one. What's it called?

Sector67 - run by Chris Meyer. They used to rent a building on the east side off Winnebago street (now demolished). They purchased an old warehouse off Corry St. in 2017 and did a really extensive renovation (almost entirely performed by members): https://isthmus.com/news/news/sector67-finds-new-home/

I spent a lot of hours welding, using the wood shop, and working on my car there.

That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds like a great place.

Not exactly Seattle, but the Bellevue library has a makerspace — https://kcls.org/bellevuemakerspace/

Oh nice, the access to a professional quality sewing machine is a cool feature. I do some hobby upholstery and using my homegamer Singer is a real limiting factor.

Look up the Seattle Rust meetup. Its still around.

The whole Seattle scene imploded in 2020.

Why do you think it hasn’t come back?

the seattle freeze is real. also a lot of people dipped out for other parts of the country.

Died in 2020 due to Covid, or just died?

Looks like covid to me, the meetings just stopped being scheduled and never came back afterwards.

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