As CodeSourcery employees work from home, we get together for a week-long meeting once a year in order to better understand each other. CodeSourcery was bought by Mentor Graphics last year, but the tradition continues for the division.
One of my favorite parts of the annual meeting is getting together with extremely talented people and having fascinating discussions about all sorts of technical things. Sometimes these are work related and sometimes we show each other our personal programming projects (the same sorts of things I talk about in this blog).
I often think it would be great to be able to have these kinds of in-person discussions more often than once a year. I've thought about setting up some kind of regular meetup in Seattle for just this kind of thing. I found Hack and Tell which seems to be exactly what I'm looking for except for the fact that it's in New York, so perhaps I should try to set up a Seattle chapter.
I also found a few things in Seattle which are similar but weren't quite what I was looking for one way or another:
- Dorkbot seems be more "electronic art" centric (although I haven't been to one of their meetings).
- Ignite Seattle seems to have a more formal format - 5 minute talks.
- Saturday House and Meet at the Pig seem to be inactive.
- Seattle Wireless HackNight at Metrix Create:Space - I actually went to this for a couple of months earlier this year. It's a very cool space and the people there seemed interesting, but the focus seemed to be more on having a set place and time to do some hacking and less on showing off personal projects to each other. I stopped going after a while partly because it didn't seem to be quite what I was looking for but mostly because it was in the evening which is problematic when you have two children who wake up you up at 7am sharp (at the latest) every day - if I don't go to bed at a sensible time I tend to be a bit of a zombie the next day.