[contenttypegeek]

A slightly different debate, but as a digital nomad (who also happens to be a programmer) I can totally relate.

Most of the meetings/conferences I went to ended with too much boozing and laughing about silly stuff and not nearly enough networking/exchanging ideas/helping each other to my liking. This was funny when I was in my late 20s, but I have different goals now.

Particularly, about the 'helping each other' part - I have the feeling that everyone is pushing their own agenda most of the time, and there is very little sincere interest in works of others - let alone helping/advising each other. More like 'let's get the compulsory presentation part down, do some quick networking... done? Let's get drunk'.

Maybe I'm visiting the wrong kind of meetings though. I'm guessing there's also a big difference between meetups in the US (never been to one, hence guessing) and in Europe (or elsewhere).

[taude]

In Boston, I'm going to use Python as an exapmle, we have a regular Python Meetups [1], in addition to a Python Project Night [2], it sounds like you're looking for something like the later, which involves a bunch of people of various skills, hacking on projects, with some experts of the community circulating around the room, etc.

I haven't been in a long time, but they were great.

[1] Example of regular Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/events/234430898/

[2] Example for April: https://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/events/237146736/

[contenttypegeek]

Yup, exactly - thanks for helping me figure it out (euphemism for 'phew, I'm not stupid for disliking all those meetups').

Alas, to my knowledge, nothing even remotely similar like that exists here (or at the places where I lived in Southeast Asia), simply because there are not enough people who would participate, let alone organize/run such a meeting.

Thinking about it, though, it makes sense: Working 100% remotely/being a digital nomad means moving AWAY from places like NY/SF/Boston/Seattle etc. (where the action happens) because they are crazy expensive; This, however, also means moving away from hubs where Python Project Nights are possible due to the sheer number of Python guys.

To have the cake and eat it too, the digital nomad hubs should have enough x (x=Pythonistas, Rubyists, whatever) to able to organize such meetings/hackathons etc. However, once that would happen, prices would skyrocket, and you would have to move again...

I don't want to derail this discussion to a digital nomad problem, so tl;dr: seems like my global location, rather than my attitude or bad choice of meetings is the culprit; To put it other way: living at tucked away islands might be romantic, but it also means no quality meetings... :(

[taude]

Luckily, in your case, there's a lot of online communities to participate in.

[aaronchall]

I hear you.

There are good meetups and there are bad meetups.

If you want "helping each other" style meetups, you need to look for ones that are office-hours style, where they have tables and conference rooms and people sitting next to each other trying to help each other.

If you have organizers that want to make a regular commitment to running them (and basically being the on-hand experts) then you should be able to get space from firms that would like to host Python programmers (and we do have members get hired out of our group by our hosts sometimes, but that is certainly not a guarantee).

If your area can economically support these things, but they aren't there, then you just need a catalyst to get them started. I would think a lot of areas in Europe should be able to start these kinds of things.

[contenttypegeek]

I'm currently in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for a longer period. I have moved here because LPdGC was dubbed as a digital nomad heaven, said to be the 'Chiang Mai of Europe' etc. It has an incredible amount of Co-working spaces relative to it's size etc. so one would think it's a perfect place for things you are describing above.

tl;dr: it's not.

Snippet from an email conversation with a local guy (author of GrapheneDB):

"Nomads apart, this is a small city, and while there are some active developer meetups, it's hard to get enough momentum, people willing to do talks, etc. I did run a Rails/Ruby meetup years ago, but it ended up being mostly people from our team + some curious guys. Eventually, I ended up not wanting to push it any further and focusing more on the business side of things."

So even though a lot of parameters are OK, the size of the city (400k in this case) seems to be enough to hamper things...