I recently moved to Mountain View and have been making an effort to meet new people in the area. My primary goal is to find some people who would want to meet up regularly and collaborate on some sort of project just for fun and for the sake of learning new things and socializing with other engineers.<p>I'm not interested in attending hackathons because I don't have the physical endurance to stay up all night, and most of the meetup groups where people get together to code are inactive. THe majority of current meetups involve only tech talks where people get together to listen to some talk, and then go home.
They have this new thing in SV that I think would be perfect for you. After a brief admissions process, you join a group of engineers who congregate at the same time and place five days of the week. You collaborate on projects, learn new things, and perhaps even socialize. They even offer you units of exchange with which you can acquire resources. It's a really great setup, and just goes to show what an innovative and dynamic place SV is.
You want to regularly sit next to people with headphones on, coding away on some side project, while momentarily taking off said headphones to ask/answer questions and talking shit about quirks of some arbitrary framework?
Come to hacker dojo (about a mile and half from downtown mountain view). I work from there somedays and I am looking for help in some of my projects. Contact me if interested. Email in profile.
So you seem to want to:<p>- socialize with other engineers,<p>- work (= program, I suppose) on interesting projects together.<p>My opinion is that programming is actually a very lonely activity to the point where I think it is actually harmful if you are not concentrated during programming. It may be more fun to get out of someone's own "bubble" for a couple of minutes and have a talk with some fellow programmer, but that fellow might be very comfortable in his/her bubble at that time, so you are actually distracting him/her.<p>So maybe you should try to find interesting software projects one way and try to socialize another.
Have you attended a hackathon? It's usually more like working full-time for a couple days than an actual marathon without sleep.<p>There's really no better way to meet other programmers that want to collaborate. Meetups are the second-best option.
I was trying to do the same thing in London, and so posted on my local Clojure user mailing list, it worked really well. More so in fact if you're happy to help people with their own project ideas, rather than your own.
Great question, feeling the same way here in Chicago! It's getting colder now, but would love to meet up with like minded people who want to create things.