Booze at tech meetups

I was out last night at the The Big Xmas [bash] #, near Silicon Roundabout. It was a fun night out meeting various people, tech, business and recruiters. Oh, the shame though – I was wearing the same T-shirt as someone else – and, yes, I have indeed replaced people with small shell scripts.

Now, to the main part of what this post is about – the rant. It’s not aimed at the particular event last night alone though. It’s alcohol at various tech-meetups in general. Look guys, you generally end up buying too much anyway, and all too often its also to the exclusion of those that may prefer to not get inebriated.

As an example, The Hacker News meetups will get dozens of pizzas (which are, admittedly all eaten – there are 150+ people attending usually), but also a couple of stacks worth of cans and bottles, each with 24 cans in each tray, several hundred cans at least. It’s just as well they aren’t all drunk on the night – many of the event-goers would be unconscious by the end. At least they will also add a few trays of soft-drinks, Lemonade and Cola.

If you want a couple of drinks to help lubricate the social aspect of an evening out, I’ve got no problem at all. I don’t though. I prefer to save my brain cells for doing interesting things, like oh, writing code?

For other events, how about adding some more soft drinks to replace some of the alcohol? Last night, the choice was booze, or fizzy water; That was all.

Thankfully, people don’t generally get blotto at the various meetups – at least that I’ve seen, but I expect there’s been one or two that have swerved their way home sometimes.

Do you have a comment about alcohol being served at the various meetups?  Would you like more, less, or do you think that organisers and sponsors are doing it right?  I would love to start a conversation here about the good or bad of it.