The NYC tech scene has been booming in the last couple of years, and the local meetup ecosystem has grown in tandem. You can attend most meetups either for free or for a very nominal $5-10, which usually includes beer and pizza. Attending meetups is a great way to network with other professionals, find out about new tech you might otherwise be unaware of, and learn about how other startups accomplish their goals.
One of my favorite meetups is the Web Performance meetup, which always hosts great speakers and interesting topics, with a focus on educating web developers on what it takes to make their sites fast. Speed is a topic that any web developer needs to be concerned with. A slow site can torpedo a business, and even those with fast, nimble sites stand to learn from the experts the Web Performance meetup regularly books. I’ve attended terrific Web Performance meetup presentations given by Steve Souders of Google and Patrick Meehan of Webpagetest.org, among others. I’ve never attended one that I didn’t learn something at.
Another great NYC meetup is the New York MongoDB User Group run by the Community Managers at 10Gen. This is a very popular meetup because MongoDB is disproportionately popular in the NYC startup community. Every monthly meeting tends to fill up fast even though they use the largest available venues and can usually seat well over 100 attendees. MongoDB is a great database that allows for fast development and its performance and scaling for tasks like analytics is stellar. (We know firsthand -- Business Insider is one of the longest-running installations of MongoDB.)
I’ve been running the NYC Varnish Cache meetup for the past few months, but now I’m folding that into the NY Web Tech Scaling group. We’re having our first meetup on Tuesday, Jan. 29 at 10gen’s office at Broadway and Prince St. I’ll talk about Business Insider’s scaling needs, how we manage to scale to the high traffic and unpredictable spikes of the online media business while maintaining our editors’ ability to quickly publish breaking, time-sensitive news.
Anyone interested in the NYC tech scene should check out any of these meetups. I’ve met a lot of great people and had some good times while learning a lot. There’s a lot to be said for Twitter and other online forums, but they can’t fully replace the face-to-face rapport that only meatspace can provide.
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