A reawakening of systems programming meetups

This year has seen a resurgence in really high quality systems programming meetups. Munich Database Meetup, Berlin Systems Group, SF Distributed Systems Meetup, NYC Systems, Bengaluru Systems, to name a few.

This post summarizes a bit of disappointing recent tech meetup history, the new trend of excellent systems programming meetups, and ends with some encouragement and guidance for running your own systems programming events.

I will be a little critical in this post but I want to preface by saying: organizing meetups is really tough! It takes a lot of work and I have a huge amount of respect for meetup organizers even when their meetup style did not resonate with me.

Although much of this post talks about NYC Systems, the reason I think this post is worth writing is because so many other meetups in a similar vein popped up. I hope to encourage these other meetups and to encourage folks in other major metros (London, for example) to start similar meetups.

I used to attend a bunch of meetups before the pandemic. But I quickly got disillusioned. Almost every meetup was varying degrees of startups pitching their product. The last straw for me was sitting through a talk at a JavaScript meetup that was by a devrel employee of a startup who literally gave a tutorial for their product.

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