How do you network as a developer?

Question

I'm returning to the workforce after a sabbatical, and I'm realizing that my professional network is very thin. Former colleagues mostly work at FAANGs where they don't have any pull, or they washed out of the profession and went off the grid. What I've tried:- online meetups: no opportunity to interact meaningfully with others- a local hacker space: very few software engineers hang out there, it's mostly semi-retired former manager types not-really-working on impossible unfunded startup ideas- Rust (IRL, on Reddit, on Discord): shallow community of mostly students and sycophants, actual Rust devs seem to work in isolation or only communicate on TwitterWhat else should I try?

fargle · Accepted Answer

UDP is nice because it can function fine unidirectionally. This is my favorite kind of networking with most people. This is also nice for realtime periodic communications. It's really IP datagrams with a tiny thin layer to support "ports" which allow multiplexing and multiple streams between IP peers.
TCP is also nice and is appropriate if you need to losslessly move a stream of data efficiently. It uses ad-hoc, heuristic, methods to deal with congestion, latency and other complex issues so it isn't perfect. But it works quite well in practice across extremely widely diverse scenarios. It's main feature is something called the "handshake" (the analogy eludes me) which some people feel is slightly controversial.
To network with non-hacker types, very small children, lawyers and other invertibrates, you might need to use a higher level protocol based on one of these. Things like RTP, SSH, UUCP, or NNTP spring to mind. I dislike SMTP and HTTP, however, and you should avoid those at all cost.