Meeting the locals!?

A more appropriate title would be: should I meet the locals or do I have any locals that I should meet and when I say locals I'm referring to local developers / web designers around my area or even around the country.

I have a big issue with this topic.

How so, you may ask?

Well for starters, around my city there is a lack of social gatherings and a shortage of developer communities. Either there are some that are so underground that not even the NSA knows about or they simply don't exist. I prefer the latter.

Not having these type of communities means that I can't share my knowledge or learn from others that work in the same field as me and share the same mother tongue. This is a major issue for me because by nature I'm a social person and I love pushing myself to newer hights with the help of the stuff I learn from others.

Sure I have Twitter, Github, G+ etc but that's on the interwebs. I'm old school, I like face to face interaction.

But there is a silver lining to all this, I found one such place where I can share the stuff I find interesting, the stuff I know about and where I can learn stuff from others. This place is a digital one in the form of devforum.ro. Devforum.ro has finally fulfilled my desire of having a place where I can talk to people that appreciate what I do and where I can learn new amazing things, that's not Twitter or any other social medium.

Above all this, I should mention that thank the web gods for all the amazing conferences that I attend. Thank the web gods for those! If it weren't for those, probably I would have gone mad and locked myself in the highest room of the tallest tower.

Still there is an issue. How can one engage with local people that have the same interests as you? I have searched the web relentlessly for events, meetups, social gatherings around my area that I can take part of. And still nothing! Why is there such a lack of socialness in small towns / areas? Are the developers scared of something? I know there are developers around the city (I attened university with 30+ of them).

Got any ideas on how to fix this? What do you do in your area? Do you organize meetups yourself? Let me know in the comments bellow.

Until next time, code long and prosper!

Stefan