My name is Arav Narula, and I'm a 17 year old high school senior from Toronto!
Over the past 2 years, I've had the opportunity to help rebuild Toronto's high school hacker community. It's been really magical being able to run hackathons, and see Toronto's high school hacker scene come more to life in the last 2 years. Last May, me and a group of friends ran Apocalypse -- Canada's largest and longest high school hackathon at Shopify HQ! It was a really rewarding event, but I'm not here to talk about that.
There's something that's bothered me for a long time and that is that there is a tendency in online communities where there is a lack of physical connection. This is true in Hack Club and almost every other community I’ve been part of that’s tangentially computer-related. Programming and programming-related mediums are often solitary activities, and hackathons attempt to solve this problem by bringing hackers together to build a long-term hacker community. Hackathons are great for just technical experiences, but they don’t give an opportunity to connect beyond just simple conversation.
The fact is that hackathons have a culture of building and shipping, and that’s perfect for the problem it's attempting to solve. I think hackathons still have their place and should exist. But in my opinion, social connectivity is also vital. When it comes to building and maintaining hacker communities, there needs to be further incentives for people to hang out, learn from each other, and have people they can just do things with.
I think meetups provide the missing middle of bringing people together; while hackathons allow for the base of a hacker community to form, meetups allow those people to gel from just acquaintances into real friend groups!
While I contend that this blog post might not be fully relevant to most of the people who read Hackernews, I hope the account opens up the floor to how we can better build and maintain hacker communities, and how meetups can play a role there. I hope it also serves as an inspring story of how this happened.
Would love some feedback! The template I'm using for my blog is a bit janky, and I'm aware of errors. If you're on desktop, reloading should fix the problem.
Welcome. There are a few general recomendations in https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
