2026-09-01
blog
inked
Coming to college made me look around for places with a common interest. You would imagine that an engineering college where a majority of the batch was majoring in computer sciences would have those groups of people... unfortunately not the case. Technical communities brewed up within college are hard to find. Sure every college has a bunch of groups that call themselves “clubs” or communities, but so flawed in their design.
The problem with these existing types of clubs & communities within universities is with the people themselves who make up the community, the structure leading the community and another problem with authority (the college management themselves). People at the core leadership are there for nothing but the clout of being at the position. Same goes for the members as well, join to be be labeled as a member of a kinda reputed club within the campus, slap a badge of recognition on a paper claiming it as a voluntary experience.
Truth is, none of these people have really done anything. Nothing really matters when you see the bigger picture that we are just a small group of people in a small university. Yet somehow, people take things to their heart and make things personal, as if their little mafia got hurt.
Being a fresher was an entry into a whole new world for me. When I was certain I was joining the university, I began looking out for clubs. I was coming from a place where I didn’t really enjoy sitting down at a desk for hours and studying (that probably explains why I joined this college), but my motive was I wanted an escape out of academics. I found a couple of places, made the cut and hopped on. Probably the best transaction of my time I’ve ever. Met interesting people, got exposed to a whole lot more in engineering that my curriculum ever did, connections paid off as well as the experience of working on things.
Things worked like clockwork back then. I wasn’t alone in this hunt for learning things. I found others and met my friends. Together we’ve worked on a bunch of little side projects, stayed up hours at night trying to build something, failed together, lots of knowledge sharing, and a lot more. It worked because the people who were brought into it came looking for the same thing — other people.
And this is the the exact weak point of the community. You cannot have something that work if the right people aren’t equally motivated for it to persist. And that number dwindled every year. And it’s interesting that engineering students aren’t motivated to try something out of the syllabus, this is only an effect of how our education system has been pushing people.
Clubs have become increasingly difficult to run, and this is because we’ve struggled with finding the people who seemed to be the right fit. We thought we had nailed it when we were given the chance to pilot the club, but with time it just revealed the mistakes with our choice.
My point of view is coming from a place where we already are very careful with our picks for the new members. Because people end up joining for the clout for clearing the bar and end up doing nothing. In my view clubs have to be self driven, you cannot force your members to form a bond when they aren’t interested themselves. Luckily I had only seen this fissure in homebrew for a brief period and things seem to be afloat.
Stepping outside the box of college, there are still people who are finding communities and meet people. Bunch of matured meet-ups, discussion & reading groups that have been there for a while, and a couple of new ones as well. As a case study - ASRG, ATLAS, Bengaluru Systems, Software Internals, Database Internals. I’m putting these out because they have helped me and countless others as well.
Will be updating this list when I come across anything interesting. If you do, please send it over to mail@adihegde.com!
I’ve had a lot of learnings while running HSP last year and passive ones while watching other communities growing. Would love to organise or be part of something once again in Bangalore outside of work this time. We didn’t have the time to do that with homebrew but it would be damn fun.
But for a small reality check, none of this work if the people driving it aren’t on board for the same reason as you are and the people steering the community fail to take time out for it as well, which is how all of these current ones work. Can’t expect a community to run itself with a push, there has to be some sort of constant effort to keep it running.
“Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”
~ Leonardo da Vinci, 1494