I always enjoyed going to local tech user groups and meetups even before moving to San Francisco. Since so many tech companies are located in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, a lot of interesting and related meetups can be found around this area.

Meetups allow you to stay up to date on what’s going on in the tech industry, meet new people that are as interested in the field as oneself, meet contributors of projects and tools you use at work and have a chat with them! Apart from gaining new knowledge for free and meeting cool people, you also get to see a lot of start-up offices from inside, many of them with cool features.

There are different kinds of meetups, most of them are presentations, but others are more hands-on workshops. Personally, I will go to meetups with topics of personal interest and, of course, work related topics. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the local Ruby meetup with a search related talk for the night. The event was called, “Secrets of a Super Search Stack” and was held at the Indiegogo offices in San Francisco.  Ryan Gehring of Indiegogo gave a presentation featuring Indiegogo’s deployment of a brand-new search stack built on ElasticSearch. It was interesting to see what others do in that area and even give them hints on what they could improve, too. So you see, it is not just about consuming, but also about sharing knowledge.