I graduated college this past spring and am moving out to New York City early September to start working my first full time job. I grew up and lived in Buffalo, NY (Go #BillsMafia) my whole life, and was very involved with the startup/tech scene in the city, participating in any Startup Weekends, Hackathons, or developer conferences/meetups that I could attend.
Since I am brand new to the city, does anyone have recommendations for groups, communities, events, or resources that will help me put my foot in the door with the NYC tech community? 👞🚪
Any suggestions or leads would be greatly appreciated! 😄
I have no idea what you've done in college (internships, side projects) before your first job, but I'll provide an automatic suggestion of Meetup.com with a brutally honest caveat. There's bound to be something there that tickles your fancy. Just from my own research, I know there's a meetup for Python users who simply just want to come together once a week to work on their projects with others, and I saw this week that they just reintroduced presentation sessions. I recently went to the HackerNest Tech Social and had a great time.
I've gone to a few of the .NET meetups, but I wouldn't recommend it not because the presenters and meetup managers are bad (in fact all of the talks have been stellar) but because the audience isn't receptive. I could go on, but this is for you, not me. There's one for people who group up to follow along with Pluralsight courses, and there's one that's a really general "drop in and ask for help/just code" called HackerHours; I haven't gone to either of those, however.
As someone fresh out of college, - though this applies to anyone outside of the group I'm going to mention - you must be forewarned of the following:
Bootcamps are firmly entrenched in the meetup space in New York
Most of the NYC meetups are hosted by people who graduated from bootcamps for people who are either in bootcamps, also graduated from bootcamps, or are thinking about attending bootcamps. A more-than-decent percentage of NYC attendees of meetups are current bootcampers or alums of bootcamps. Because of this, you will find that a chunk of the meetups are technically open to everyone, but will have content focused on the bootcamper group. No one's gonna exclude you or tell you to leave, but your experience will be different and you might walk away with less than you thought you would have - possibly even nothing, where you'd consider the visit a bust. There will also be a lot of groups hosted by bootcamps and/or their alums dedicated merely to teaching people an abridged version of what you went through for your Programming I course in college in the hopes of netting future students for the bootcamp.
Good luck!