Last night I drove up to Cincinnati to the OINK PUG annual holiday get-together at the Brazenhead Irish Pub. OINK PUG stands for Ohio, Indiana, Northern Kentucky PHP User Group. While I’m mostly a Perl guy, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the PHP world too, and there were several people that were going to be there that I wanted to talk to.
I live in Central Kentucky, and the meeting was way up on the north side of Cincinnati, so it was quite a drive. While I drove I was thinking back to the days when there was a Perl and PHP user group right here in Lexington, and I was regularly in attendance. The Perl User Group (aka Lexington.pm) fizzled out just over ten years ago due to insufficient interest, and, in retrospect, the fact that we were Doing It Wrong.
The Internet is great at disseminating technical information, but it’s not so great at personal interaction. For this reason, I personally prefer local user groups that are light on technical information, and heavy on personal interaction. That is, user groups that have fewer technical lectures and more beer tend to last longer. (Note: I’m certainly not saying that this is the only way to do things, but it seems to be, in my experience, what endures.) User groups built around technical presentations need to either be in areas where there’s an enormous wealth of technical companies (viz: Not central Kentucky), or they tend to degenerate over time into the same 2 or 3 people giving talks about stuff you could have learned on line.
Last night’s “meeting” was a great time of talking with old friends and making new ones, as well as a fascinating conversation with a developer from one of our Sourceforge projects, XOOPS. (I’ll be posting a podcast with him some time in the next two weeks.)
Writing code all day can be a very lonely occupation, particularly for those of us who are lucky enough to work from home. Getting out and rubbing shoulders with your fellow-geek is a great way to reconnect, swap ideas, and remind ourselves that we are social beings.
I strongly encourage you to find your local user groups, and attend once in a while. It can be hard to find one that has a schedule that works with your life, but it’s worth the effort.