Getting into Meetups

I like meetups a lot

• Co-ran a meetup with a friend before I moved to New York, made some of the best friends of my life
• When I moved to NYC, I went for meetups, and my only regret is that I didn't go to more!

The community

• When we talk about reaching out to the community, half of the time, that means meetups
• In tech, meetup.com is the real deal
  • FSA even hosts one, if you haven't noticed!
• In your job hunt, you should consider meet-upping
• Pre-job hunt -- great if you have time on a weekend, but don't get distracted

Socializing is hard

• It's okay, it's just other programmers
• People are generally nice people who want the same thing you want
  • Don't have this fear: people will think I'm just being friendly in case they can get me job
  • "I've never gotten a job as a result of an interview - I've only gotten anything by being recommended by friends" - a friendly person from a meetup

Dealing with creeps

• Let's address my male privilege
  • It's a lot easier for me to say go hang out with a bunch of random people from the internet
• I highly recommend bringing a copilot to new meetups - you all have each other now!
• There are some incredible and active all-female meetups

I don't want to be a n00b

• Do you like helping people? Most other people in the world feel the same way
  • People will actually like you more if they have the chance to help you

You're in better shape than you think

• JavaScript is sort of a big deal right now - a lot of experienced programmers are encountering it for the first time
• You're all actually pretty cool people because you specialize in JavaScript - you may in fact find yourself helping much more experienced programmers!

Some active tech meetups:

• Beginner Programmers / Hacker Hours (totally cool people, I've talked there)
• NY JavaScript (FSA has hosted here)
• Women Who Code NYC (Shanna is an organizer!)
• League of Women Coders
• ngNYC (Joe just gave a talk here!)
• New York Javascript Study Group
• Hack Manhattan (hardware focus)
• SQL NYC (larger events)
• Learn Python NYC
• Many more!

Summary

• Be yourself!
• Be safe!
• Have fun!