Ask HN: Is there a Houston tech scene?

Houstonian here.

Houston has a huge tech presence, but it is all about enterprise infrastructure and auxiliary enterprise services, or highly specialized tech disciplines (the sort of things that OEM hardware manufacturers, NASA, etc. want). Most of the devs are either old school or .NET drones, and there's very little of the sort of dev scene that you see in places like the Bay Area. There's one notable hackerspace (TX/RX Labs).

There's not a 'scene' per se, and even groups that focus on things like datacenter/enterprise infrastructure don't really get much traction. Part of this is because a.) Houston has a multitude of separate central business districts that are reasonably distant from each other, and that b.) the greater Houston area is incomprehensibly HUGE (compared to what most people, even Americans, are used to). On a normal day without rush hour traffic, it can take nearly 1.5 hours to drive from what most Houstonians consider the West end of the 'Houston area' (Katy, TX) to the East end (La Porte or Baytown, TX). It's a 60 mile trip. With tech folks spread out all over this massive area, most people, especially those outside the inner-loop (I-610) don't really want to bother with commuting to meetups or events. Especially because the public transport infrastructure here is piss poor.

There is, but it's largely connected to the oil industry (and to a much lesser extent, NASA). The culture is much different too; it's not nearly as free-wheeling as Silicon Valley, has much more in common with mainstream, traditional business culture, and has much lower labor mobility. They get paid a lot and sometimes get to work on cool problems, though.