My brain made all kinds of excuses to me, like, "you don't even a proper laptop to use on the go", "you write like shit", "it is way too far", "it would be tiring", yada yada yada. But in the end, a lonely super boring Saturday forced me to finally book the ticket for the Indie Web Club.
Today morning, I was excited. I fished out my broken surface book pro. Installed a fresh copy of KDE Linux, cause why not? And I was ready to go. I am worried about the battery (54% atm) as I don't have a charger with me now but all in all, it has turned out to be a good machine to carry around.
I arrived at Blue Tokai at 1 PM. Sweaty and tired, cause I foolishly decided to walk till here from the Indiranagar Metro Station. I ordered a cold brew and rested for half an hour to bring my energy back up for the meetup. Finally I went to the Underline center. The lift definitely gave me the creeps as it is super slow and vibrates like it is gonna fall off any moment.
I saw a message on the Indie Web group from Ankur that he was at the terrace grabbing a bite. So I decided to go up and meet some humans. After a quick round of introductions and a stale croissant, we went back down to see a bunch of people waiting.
The event was about review reading and writing. The setup of the event was really informal, 4-5 tables in a U configuration (I am sorry, I am not very good at descriptions) with a projector at the center. Ankur started off by asking everyone to introduce themselves. I had decided that I would talk about my interest in Open Data platforms like OpenStreetMaps, Wiki Data but ended up just saying that I am just looking to get back into literature.
As people started expressing their views about reviews, I felt for the first time that how shallow I am with my media consumption and book reading. I realized that I have a lot of opinions about technologies but very little about the books I read or the movies I watch. People here had spent a lot of time on platforms that I had not even heard about like Letterboxd or Mataroa or Pitchfork itself. I had a lot to share but as is the usual me, I just kept looking for the right place to speak, which, spoiler alert, never happened.
I also discovered articles that I had not read before but found really tempting to read like "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again", "Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown" because one I am a software developer and as part of work I have been using a lot of AI lately even though it is limited to work and two, I used to be a fan of Dan Brown. And as part of growing up, I have learned to love reading views that challenge my opinions.
After 2 hours of sitting silently and listening to others nerd about reviews and the culture around it, we decided to break. People gathered around to talk about things. I joined a discussion where a guy (sorry, I forgot your name, if you are reading this) talking about his SplitWise alternative which was totally stateless and required no accounts or server, which sounded amazingly simple and clean. This was specially interesting because I had failed to build a SplitWise alternative myself because I felt the database would be too complicated.
After the break, we got 5 topics (all around reviews) to write on or we could also choose anything of our liking. And this is where I wrote down this small review of the experience at the Indie Club meetup. Times up, so gotta go!