Public Service Announcement. Reading research papers is so important for your growth and career, please put in a process to do it at least once in a month or two. (I will try to write a blog post about why it is important, and how to go about it, since I see there is a big need for this.)

Papers We Love is a great resource, https://paperswelove.org/, if you like to get involved in a community to dip your feet into reading papers first.

Papers We Love was one of the two excellent meetups in NYC (the other being the Linux Users Group). That is, it wasn't just vendor advertisement time.

Unfortunately I don't think it's come back since the pandemic.

Hope it does.