From Heather Burns:

After years of dragging my arse to the only mildly tolerable option, an open source community meetup appeared – in the function room of a twee Oirish pub, no less – and what ensued didn’t so much pivot my business but my entire life.

And on that evidence, it’s no wonder that so many of us, starting around a dozen years ago, left behind networking hell and took to open source community meetups like a duck to water.

Specifically Dale and Dwayne who ran WP Touch. I met them at a local WordPress Meetup and their plugin took off so they started sending me clients that they could no longer service. Then there were many other people that shared work and made contacts with me that all started with WordPress Meetups.