Last night I went to a Node.js meetup in at Pivotal Labs in New York. About 10 people showed up, which was perfect.
We talked in depth about the reasons for choosing Node as a tool or not, the attraction of full-stack JS, why Rails is a fine choice in NY (available developers, as opposed to say, Central PA), etc.
Really, really smart guys, talking about threading, concurrency issues, forking computation-intensive routines, the lack of enough contributors to the libraries, etc. Fun to listen to.
What struck me was that none of these guys were consultants. They all worked at startups of one stage or another.
In glass-walled room nearby, another SkillShare event was underway, with twice the people crammed in to learn about product management skills.
At some point a few Pivotal devs started playing ping pong. That was at around 8 pm, when we decided to end the meeting.
At which point some of us stood around and talked about the merits/and not of the Occupy movement until about 9, while others talked more about Node. I should have joined the Node group.
So here we are, leaving at 9 pm, the other SkillShare session still going, hungry for a bite to eat, and stepping out into NY life, and on the way down talking about semantic analysis, search, etc. Then goodbye.
There’s nothing like the level of care, commitment, and intellectual curiosity that you get from having your own inspired developers who love to solve problems, learn new things, and develop cutting-edge mastery of their craft. And everyone around it picks up on that vibe, and it helps keep the energy pumping through a startup.
You simply don’t get that environment through outsourcing.