Hack4Reno: Reno's 24 Hour open data hackathon

by colinloretz • 15 years ago

28 10 15 years ago

NullSet2• 15 years ago

how much interest have you been seeing? I have absolutely no idea as to the size of Reno's hacker community even though I live here.

Homunculiheaded• 15 years ago

I don't know the answer to the interest Q, but Reno has a pretty descent hacker community out there and I believe it has the potential to grow quite a bit. For rather obvious reasons most Reno hackers either telecommute or work for themselves, so the tricky part is making the Reno hacker community increasingly aware that it actually exists ;) Hopefully this event will do a lot for that.

colinloretz• 15 years ago

Ahh where to start. Our goal is 50 developers & designers in teams of up to 4 and we're already up to 25 registered. We will definitely exceed the 50 goal before October 15th gets here.

The Reno hacker community is starting to bubble a little bit. We have a lot of people in the area that do remote work and work from home so you might be out at a bar and be sitting next to a great developer without realizing it because they are probably not used to discussing their work with people locally.

Some background, I run the Reno Collective coworking space in town. I've been working to pull these folks out of their remote work caves and start meeting one another either here at the space or at our events.

The business and "technology" community that gets most of the attention in Reno is pretty much stuck in 1995 and we've been trying to change that through Ignite Reno, WordCamp, monthly hacknights and now with Hack4Reno we're trying to be more public about the fact that there is a lot of great talent in the area.

I could go on forever, but if you're looking to get in touch with the local dev community, we are having the next Hack4Reno meetup on Wednesday at Reno Collective at 5:30pm or feel free to come by anytime during the week, I'd love to meet you.

NullSet2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the info, I'll stop by on Wednesday if I can, I live 2 blocks away.

yodasan2• 15 years ago

The tech community is there ... it's just hard to see. I've been working out of the Reno Collective for about 6 months now. I'm a software developer that took the plunge from corporate to freelancing and was working out of Starbucks, the library, my home, etc. I have to say that I was about to move to SF for the tech atmosphere before I learned that there is a real tech community here .. it's just sort of dislocated and disconnected in smaller groups. I'm really hoping to see Hack4Reno and other future events bring these groups together and sort of showcase the fact that there is a growing tech community out there.

AshleyJ• 15 years ago

Yes, it is here! Our bootstrapped startup has been working out of the Reno Collective for 6 months or so as well, and there is a lot of cross-pollination in that space. Eric Jennings, my partner, was at Techstars Winter 2010, so there is talent here, they just telecommute or work for themselves. It's time for us to meet one another. Please hakers and developers, come out of your caves and meet us.

jrbj• 15 years ago

He's too modest to mention it, but yodasan and colinloretz are two of the 3-member team that created Colorstache, which was one of the five finalists in the Evernote Developer competition.

I'm also a Reno Collective member. I work out of the space writing iOS and Mac apps as an independent developer. Before finding the Collective, I was under the impression that no one was doing any Python, Ruby, or Cocoa (or anything similar) in the area. It was great to find out that there were all these people in Reno quietly working on cool stuff.

dearmash• 15 years ago

Hey Chris,

I can just imagine you working out of a starbucks ;) I did the opposite & headed out to the bay area. I do miss the Reno community though, small as it was. Unfortunately about the same time I made the decision to move, all of these really good communities started to develop and make themselves known. If you do perchance remember a Harold once upon a time, I'd enjoy the chance to catch up. If you aren't perchance chris, then wrong number, enjoy hack-week-end.

elskwid• 15 years ago

NullSet, the interest is on the rise. Each day we get more and more people to register.

Full disclosure: I'm helping to organize Hack4Reno

We think this is a good way to get Reno to bootstrap itself. Get people like yourself to see that there is a hacker community and that it is much larger than they would have guessed. Get the City to see that we are here and that we love our town. Get the tech/dev/design community to showcase itself by doing great work right here.

I run the local Ruby brigade with almost all our members, we have about 10, earning their daily bread with Ruby. There is also the Northern Nevada Software Developers Group, which pulls in more of the MS/Java crowd and I hear that there is a small Java meetup happening.

Hack4Reno: Reno's 24 Hour open data hackathon

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