When I was a student at umich we had a group called Michigan Hackers that I hung out with, or maybe was a part of depending on how well defined our concept of membership was from semester to semester. The group had a whole bunch of projects, but the most consistently successful was hack night. Once a week a couple dozen of us would meet in a conference room or a house or a startup incubator or somewhere else around town that would put up with us and code together.
It was a pretty basic event and it helped that the university would give us some pizza money, but it really impressed on me the value of having people around while I’m hacking. Not just the disinterested fellow patrons of a cafe or a library, but fellow travelers. Other people working on similar projects to yours, available for body doubling and bouncing ideas off of.
I’ve been doing some work on small personal projects recently, moving over some of my repos to Codeberg and setting up a Woodpecker CI instance. I’m making progress, but I miss having that little community as an excuse and encouragement to push a bit further.