Are there in person communities for this sort of thing? I've set myself a personal project to reproduce some circuits I have in a 1947 paper. But I'm not a hard

Are there in person communities for this sort of thing? I've set myself a personal project to reproduce some circuits I have in a 1947 paper. But I'm not a hardware guy, huge tracts of the tooling are opaque, best practices are unclear, etc etc etc. So I'm looking to just come meet people in person who know the material and can provide advice. Do such groups exist? Especially in Los Angeles?