Yes, depending on where you live. There are many such events on meetup.com. Although the pandemic shut down a lot of this stuff. The open source world also has a lot of this spirit, although the "hacking together" is often virtual rather than in-person (although conferences provide a good venue for in-person meetups for people who are geographically distributed).

So, I ran a few of those, called them Hacking Society. In Fort Collins we have a Linux Users Group that meets on Tuesdays, in Boulder it meets on Thursdays. So the remaining Tue/Thu of the month I would secure space, often at a coffee shop, for us to get together and work on projects. It has worked very well, I did it for ~20 years, I know the Fort Collins one is still going strong. If you want a location page on HackingSociety.org, let me know and we'll figure out a way to set you up one.

But mostly it's about just finding and announcing a place with a regular schedule. For the first ~10 years, I took "meeting notes" about what people did, which I felt helped keep people in mind of the "working on projects" component.

See if there’s a hackerspace or makerspace near you. Many have regular nights/days where they get together and work on stuff.

Our local one does Tuesday nights and Friday days where everyone who’s available comes on and works on projects, either their own or group projects.

Not that there’s anything wrong this this, but I tend to see them focused around 3D printer stuff and rarely much software. I’d love to see more software hangouts

The Ruby Meetup I attend used to have hack nights once a month where you could work on what you wanted.

Makerspaces might be a good place to contact?

wondering the same thing as a 30yr kind of person who is a not a professional dev but would love to find a community out in SoCal!

www.recurse.com

This.