I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in, took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.
Some observations
- I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right
now"
. This made me realize that from a technology
perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some
time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months
(man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them. - There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
- I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or
maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas . The ideas
floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
- I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on side projects.