[CuriouslyC]

Do you genuinely want to know more people, or are you just looking to advance your career?

If career advancement is all you're interested in, go to toastmasters, practice presenting, work up a good presentation and get speaking slots at meetups or conventions. Talk to people who come up to you afterwards. If you're so inclined, add them to linkedin/facebook. When you're ready to write another presentation, contact the people you met and ask them what they would find helpful. Wash rinse repeat.

Contributing to a notable open source project on github is also a great way to make contacts, and they'll often know prominent places that use it. If you're going to work with a specific tech, an email from the project lead will look good, as will an active commit log.

[turnleavesover]

I'd like to advance my career, but not at the risk of being ingenuine to people. I'm unable to form long-term bonds with other professionals, though. I view colleagues from a more utilitarian point of view, only there to help us carry out the work, that serves a practical need for me, but not necessary for my personal company.

With the suggestions you made, I think there's a misunderstanding. I am not seeking to be exceptional. I am a below-average programmer that just seeks to become average and is fine being average in my career. The average person does not go to Toastmasters, and the average programmer does have to contribute to a major Github project. There are a lot of developers 40 and over that are pretty average and working steady jobs, and they don't do any "extra-professional" work for themselves.

My career goal: to be an average developer without a care in the world. No Toastmasters, no being a leader, no tech evangelism, just want job security and clock out in a timely manner every day.

[__sdegutis]

> I'm unable to form long-term bonds with other professionals, though. I view colleagues from a more utilitarian point of view, only there to help us carry out the work, that serves a practical need for me, but not necessary for my personal company.

That's probably what all this is stemming from. Look at your colleagues and coworkers as people, just trying to make a living like you are. You don't need to go to bars with them, but showing a genuine interest in how they're doing in the morning when you both get into work can go a long way. At the end of the day, we're all just people trying to get by. If you have that friendly acquaintanceship then it will be rewarding in its own right for both of you, but could also lead to jobs in the future, not that this should be the reason for it, because like you said, then it would be disingenuous.