And that is what we call Date Night

Last night was March Mingle 2013 (where were you?). If you're a part of San Diego's tech scene and don't know what this is, you're missing out. It is basically a giant watering hole event of engineers and technical people, as well as companies, consultants, and recruiters. If you're looking for candidates, this is the place to be. If you're looking for a company to work for, this is the place to be. If you're looking to drink beer and make super geeky jokes with other engineers, this is the (safe) place to be.

My boss had bought the whole team tickets long ago for this event, and M had gone a couple years ago and had a great time, so he bought himself a ticket for this year. The line at the venue (Scale Matrix's office building) was huge, like the line at Disneyland for Space Mountain. Right off the bat, we were saying hi to people we knew in line, including my brilliant social media teacher, Stacy Zapar of Tenfold Social Training and her husband Greg, COO of Tenfold and former VP at Digitaria. As the security guards herded, I mean ushered, the four hundred-some attendees into the sleek event space, I continued to run into developers I knew or had placed. A .NET developer with UI skills, a Javascript guru with node.js, coffeescript and MongoDB, a Java developer who came from a gaming background and had worked with every programming language known to man.

By the time M arrived from work, I was clutching my drink and standing in the thick of geeky conversation. When I turned away to talk to others, and turned back, M and some other developers were deep into some discussion about how to catapult things into space. I have no idea how these topics come up. I'm sure other, normal husbands talk about golf.

The rest of the night was spent descending on tables of computer programming user groups, asking if I could sponsor beer for their meetings and promising I'd stay quiet, asking really dumb questions about a company's web servers, and running into recruiters from other agencies, holding very careful, cagey conversations. M spent a lot of the night looking for the food table (with very limited success).

All in all, it was a fun night for me, talking to smart people and pretending to be smart (with very limited success). I imagine other couples enjoy the social scene in the setting of a gala, or an art exhibit opening. We, apparently, enjoy hob-nobbing with people who can explain exactly how Coffeescript distills Javascript into the essentials for a more elegant and readable syntax.