[paganel]

> Do people go to meetups to learn something? I guess I always treated them as networking events to expand my sphere

I last went to a programmers' meetup about 3 years ago, and did that in order to specifically see a guy make a presentation about ElasticSearch. We were also using ES at our job back then, but at a much smaller scale compared to that guy's company did, so I wanted to learn additional stuff about how ES works and how it needs to be configured when the numbers increase.

It was a nice presentation, can't say I remember much from back then (I've also not used ES in the meantime as much as I would have liked), but some presentations do have a learning purpose.