Ask HN: How to connect with fellow developers given few physical opportunities?
Hello!
I've been studying Computer Science for a few years, but due to changing my major as well as a lot of online classes I haven't been able to meet many fellow developers in my university, especially not those who share my interests within the field. And as far as I know, there aren't many physical community gatherings happening close to where I live.
I would like to change that.
So: those of you who have managed to successfully connect with other developers online, how did you do it?
If anyone would like to chat or learn together, just send me a message here or email me at: erikpl (at) duck (dot) com. These days, my learning is focused on C (related to a compiler course) and video streaming (work-related). I host a small Discord for devs hacking on cool tech through my company (for an invite go to https://discord.multiprocess.io). Folks here interested in compilers/databases/emulators/big data/ML are welcome to join, introduce yourself and hang out. Fwiw discord was totally unwilling to let me in. 'Something is wrong', asked for an email then told me it was already registered, then asked for a date of birth and told me it's unauthorized. Ah, that sucks. First I've heard of that happening. Maybe try with a new email or with the email+suffix@ hack? Try to recover the account via email? Looks like you got in? I see someone with your name in there now. Sorry to be "that guy", but why Discord and not Matrix? I wanted to pick the least FOSS-friendly platform around! Just kidding. I don't really know what to say. I think Discord is more mature than Matrix, though it's great as an IRC(-bridge) client. You're welcome to start your own community on Matrix if you'd like! Go where your users already are is a pretty basic best practice. What is Matrix? It's an answer to your question and I am genuinely curious. FOSS self hostable messenger with e2e encryption Will check it out, looks interesting. Easier to use? Video games, and not the common ones. Ive met some engineers with far too much time and money. Most of the time it's in more MMO kind of games. Other times it's Vrchat, because the programming and game dev side attracts all sorts. A lot of big names meetup in VR, but hard to get into those circles really. I've found furry world's to somehow be the underground secret engineer meetup place. I met an Intel engi a few weeks ago. For me, I found a server on Discord that I liked. There is one for almost every programming niche at this stage. Introducing yourself on the channel can get you going so to speak and then go slowly from there. Helping people, having fun etc.. I like attending Gather.town events. However, usually chatrooms are better for discovering stuff. Online meetups.
One video chat with voice = 200 smart comments on IRC (that was the old slack) Go to meetup and sign up for whatever topics you are interested in. Almost all the meetings are going to be on zoom these days. Online meetups (IME) are traaaash. Old-style meetups, most people would attend with a colleague or to meet up with someone specific, not randos who wandered in. New-style COVID meetups, you just have a pre-recorded talk or someone struggling with screen-sharing for 20 minutes, and then you have 20 anonymous windows on Zoom with only 2-3 people doing the thing where they're nominally asking a question, but actually telling some kind of tiresome and dubious anecdote. Out of the box suggestion: I moved to Taipei. There’s no COVID here so besides the 2-3 month lockdown last year I’ve been able to go to many in-person meetups like normal. Virtual is _fine_ but for my personality meeting in person is still my preferred way by far. I can’t recommend moving here enough to anyone who needs a place to live a normal life and wait out COVID. Genuine question, how is there normal life + no COVID there? I’m Australian (but stranded abroad) and thought we’d now run out of countries without it. Also, spending time in basically any ‘red’ state in the USA can get you the same result. We’ve been living life as usual, almost no restrictions, since at least April of 2021. It’s nice, and believe it or not, the sky is in fact not falling. It’s not as hard as ‘they’ would like you to believe, to be smart & stay safe, while also leading a normal life. My mom lives in a red state (SC) and works at a hospital... they're going to have to call in the National Guard because of all of the covid cases. If you get in a car crash, good luck getting into the emergency room. Same is happening in blue states like Rhode Island…..we have to move on and live with the virus, and red states knew that way before blue states.
Don’t look at the case counts media is using to scare you, but rather hospitalizations and deaths > ”we have to move on and live with the virus” Thanks, this is the crux of my point really. There will never be ‘no Covid’ from here on out. We will never be able to eradicate it. The sooner we’ll all accept this the better. We will have to live with it for the rest of our lives. > but rather hospitalizations The hospitals are all on bypass where they're calling in the national guard. Genuinely curious question: how do tell the sky hasn't fallen? American media is so polarized and dramatized that I imagine it's as disorienting on the inside as it feels from the outside. For context, I believe covid has killed more Americans than anything else in your history (though I haven't been able to confirm that, most wartime figures are estimates). That doesn't mean lock down and mask up but surely doing nothing is equally bad? Just seems like covid has become political theater and it gets minimized somewhat as a result > I believe covid has killed more Americans than anything else in your history It is difficult to tell because it depends on how you measure. You could for example, logically, surmise that it does not matter what we die of. Everybody dies, it is just a question of cause of death. From that point of view covid has killed nobody because if they haven't died of covid they would eventually die of something else. Is a death of 90yo the same as death of 20yo? What about lack of medical help that could extend the live of an ill person by couple more years? I can assume a lot of people could have their lives extended by at least a year or two given proper care. When grandpa dies it is definitely tragic event, but it does not leave the same mark on the family as young parent or a child dying because we do not expect the young ones to die. Young person's death frequently leaves scar on the family forever while at the same time we are used to the idea of old people dying, eventually. I think these things should be measured on "How many healthy years it has taken." From that point of view wars are extremely damaging because they not only kill people, but mostly young healthy ones that could have long lives ahead of them. They destroy families, mark people with violence. US does not really understand what war is because the wars it has fought were not on US soil. It only has second hand stories of wars and some number of grieving families. I live in Poland and my grandparents lived through a real war. Real, scary, unrestricted, inhuman violence. The signs of WWII are here everywhere TO THIS DAY. The personal stories that I heard turned my stomach inside out when I heard it. Except for the “no Covid” part… Turn off your TV, delete your reddit account and covid goes away. Does it? I've had 3 friends of friends die of it since Thanksgiving. I don't know whether they had TVs or Reddit accounts, but I don't think getting rid of them would have helped much. There have also been a lot more exposures in my immediate social circle than previously. Even in SE states, even when the positivity rate was below 5% (which was roughly 2 months at a time) we didn't get back to regular tech meetups. It's Taiwan. Still the lowest COVID rate and from early on. Still one of the last democracies that aren't corrupted. Yeah, my question was why. What is so different about it? To my understanding SARS hit Taiwan REALLY hard, so they've been extra extra careful about COVID ever since it was discovered. The constant threat of imminent destruction bringing people together? Is it possible to live on English? It's _possible_, especially in Taipei, but you'll want to take some classes before you go. I have non-Taiwanese friends who never learned Chinese, but they all regret it. I find language learning fun though so it's definitely a feature, not a bug, for me personally. Depending on what your skills are, some industries are conducted entirely in English. Learning Mandarin has major benefits. When I moved to Taiwan, I spent a non-trivial part of my time in Mandarin classes. It absolutely helped with daily life and connecting with other people even though my industry is one of those "entirely in English" ones. A bit involved, but regularly contributing to an open source project that you like might work. I have great fun on small discords, join the community for a software library you use, a game engine, an open source project, a topic, e.g emulator development. The smaller the better usually. I found lunchclub.com useful for this. I looked into this... I saw some folks claiming it's flooded with Amway and other MLM pushers. Have you experienced this? I mostly talked to data-scientists in Europe and made interesting connections. I usually check people's LinkedIn, twitter, etc before agreeing to meet. So no, I haven't seen any MLM, but maybe I'm more strict in my filtering than others. Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like an interesting way to meet random technical people. HackerNews! It's the highest-quality, broadest, and most far-ranging community of developers, engineers, technologists, and rational sympathizers! Hey, I'm Arth. I'm the co-founder of a startup actually solving this called ConnectDome[dot]com. It's like super-charged Lunchclub but for developers with tools that make the whole process of what you described in your post easier. We are releasing a major update pretty soon and since it's developer-only, I might be posting a Show HN for it soon as well, you should try it ig, I could always work on feedback from more developers. Perhaps HN could use WIP "Work In Progress" threads? Start a physical gathering. There are lots of us that want to meet and aren't obsessed with corona. I hold regular weekly meetups and have done so throughout the last few years, it has been a welcome respite and I have formed some long standing and close relationships. I have found the people I've met to be more community minded and more prone to take the initiative and branch out to new people. Finding the right Slacks and Discords will definitely help form more intimate relationships, but I've also been gaining a huge amount of value during the pandemic from the software engineering community on Twitter. It took me a _long_ time to find the "real" software engineering community on twitter. If you just follow the topic, 98% of the "software engineering" tweets are garbage like > 10 reasons why JavaScript is the next BIG language that all developers should learn!!!1! just engagement spam. BUT, once you follow a good dev account you tend to find others. Can you recommend some good dev accounts to bootstrap the discovery process? join IRC servers, Discord servers, contribute to open source, be active in suggestion discussions internet is a richer world than IRL, flawed with social codes, unfair physical comparisons, wealth gap issues etc on the internet, you are just another random user, it's beautiful the only time it's ugly, is when people censor you because you speak the truth and it goes against their agenda.. but this is the same stuff IRL, the advantage of the internet is you can create a new life, it's a matter of a click embrace the internet, contribute, and eradicate the censors by pissing them off I use Founders Cafe for this. Everyday, I co-work with founders from Stanford/Harvard/YC in person (in PALO ALTO!) and also virtually too (everyday they have cowork seshs) so fucking worth Looks nice! Might be worth clarifying in your bio or comment that you founded it too. Or also that this is a paid service that's priced at several hundred dollars (billed annually! if you're cool enough to be "selected"!). I don't think there's anything wrong in general with charging people for something you provide. I support that part. I just think it's good to be clear about your relationship with the thing you're advertising. It's the combination of two things: saying that some solution is "so fucking worth" as if you're evaluating it impartially, and then also failing to mention that it costs a surprising amount of money. The opposite would have been to say "I think I can solve this for you for $50 a month." you should have assumed that when they started name dropping. Get involved in open source projects with communities. You'll build rapport and connections will naturally spring from them. How did you get a Duck Duck Go email address? All this seems to do is remove some external tracking and replace it with DDGs own? They state they never save your emails, but they don't have to save them to extract metadata or scan for content they are interested in. We need a self hosted version of this service IMHO... Slack, discord, and similar chatty places. It's very niche, so joining several is helpful. Quite a few active channels on IRC (Libera.chat) as well! Can you recommend any specific communities on Slack/Discord? GameDevNetwork is a pretty chill one for game development. Lots of new people but also some big industry people there. The emudev discord is pretty cool too. https://www.reddit.com/r/EmuDev/comments/9mop2q/join_the_off... For the .NET ecosystem (and also related topics), there is the excellent and very active C# Discord server. You can find me on there as NathanAldenSr#2130. The CodingBlocks podcast has a great slack community! How do you find those communities? Do you simply Google: Slack +"data scientists" or do you use a specific community directory? In Aus/NZ, there's View Source and DevANZ (both Slack). Discord is a good bet