I gave away an old switch to a guy on Gumtree. He mentioned he was building a machine cabinet. We got talking. He's now my home lab shoptalk guy, and we meet in the pub every other month.

I gave away an old PCB to a guy in gumtree. We got talking. He's now my 3D printer shop talk guy, and we meet at the pub every other month.

It's surprisingly easier to foster your own hacker space if you trade goods in those circles.

Best part is that Gumtree/Craigslist/Kleinanzeigen let you define a radius to meet these people, so they're all local

I'd advise against the "Im lonely..." angle in seeking out these connections, go more for the "hey I've got this thing you might want..." style patter, even if the former is true.

And always use protection.

For me problem is that talking with developers most of the time is more annoying than it is worth.

Being one-upped all the time, having devs nag about tiny irrelevant flaws just to show who is smarter. Adding just one more sentence to keep upper hand and trying to „make better” when good wasn’t done yet.

When I was younger I also had my fair share of those flaws.

back in the days of LAN parties, assembling PCs, making your own website with HTML/CSS/Perl, torrenting music etc. it seemed like a lot of random people around me had some level of competence and enthusiasm for at least one IT area. this is all gone. while one can argue that given how comfortable UX got and so you no longer need to know what a file is, I nonetheless believe such enthusiasm has never been more important. instead people are happy with what a bunch of mega corporations spoon feed them.

I found great enjoyment from https://late.sh/. I'm not as active as I would like to be but the small community is still active enought that there is basically always someone around to chat with.

I live in an area dominated by finance and commerce people (New York Suburbs).

I’ve learned not to talk about what I do, as I see eyes glaze over, quickly, when I do.

If I were to talk about the commodities exchanges, though, we’d be chatting up a storm.

I miss having people to talk to, about this stuff. The few techhies around, tend to freeze me out. They all like going into Brooklyn, to hang out.

I guess that’s one reason that I’m so busy here.

I (software engineer) have lived with a software engineer for 14 years. We (half jokingly, somewhat seriously) refer to non-software engineers as "real persons", or human-humans.

I recently moved to London. Would be really really happy to meet up with others who enjoy computers/hobbyists. If you have a blog, I'm interested in meeting you! There are too many corporate events here and almost no hobbyist groups.

In most places there are software meetups, in my area there are many at meetup.com. I once started one myself, that later got taken over and is still quite big. Actually a lot of fun, and at the time we would even get sponsoring offers quite quickly.