

Ask HN: How can I meet other programmers? - piratelogic

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.<p>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.<p>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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Wilduck
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.

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devs1010
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

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hkarthik
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.

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steventruong
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.

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PedroCandeias
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.

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bmelton
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/>

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rman666
Um, start a Meetup and Tweet about it? It'll cost $50.

~~~
piratelogic
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!

~~~
rmATinnovafy
How about just tweeting about it?

Pick a known local place and tweet it.

