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Yeah, I think you're right. You make a good point about there being plenty of users of interesting tech everywhere, but the creators of interesting tech are rar

Yeah, I think you're right. You make a good point about there being plenty of users of interesting tech everywhere, but the creators of interesting tech are rarely in the Southeast. I can't think of any big players really. To be fair to you, I was partially responding to a general attitude I find on HN that if you're not on the West Coast, then you're clearly not a real/good/respectable software developer – which is not what you were saying. And I'm probably somewhat biased by the awesomeness of my little town (Charlottesville, VA), which has interesting startups like VividCortex (creating awesome DB monitoring tools using Golang), RoomKey (since purchased but started here as a Clojure shop), Center for Open Science (creating frameworks and doing cool stuff in Python), etc. And people in my circle are committers to Elastic Search, Kafka, etc., but I acknowledge that's uncommon.

devonkim 11y ago
There's a fair chance I met you at a meet-up in the DC area, which smaller professional communities can be good for. I'm familiar with VividCortex and met a few engineers up there at DevOps DC. When there's less companies, it's easier to form tighter bonds and there's less chance for negative competition like in much denser areas of competing professionals. Charlottesville, VA is a sort of Sunnyvale, CA in my mind - it's about the same mental distance as the craziness going on in the real urban area up north of it, and it has some history with some access to capital (UVA / William & Mary alumni really). Heck, I considered moving there but I consider it still tough for local jobs without the relative drop in cost of living. Granted, where I moved it sunk potential income harder, but the even lower cost of living is critical when bootstrapping companies, and cheap craft beer is a perk few areas where you can buy a great house for under $200k can claim.

devonkim 11y ago

There's a fair chance I met you at a meet-up in the DC area, which smaller professional communities can be good for. I'm familiar with VividCortex and met a few engineers up there at DevOps DC. When there's less companies, it's easier to form tighter bonds and there's less chance for negative competition like in much denser areas of competing professionals. Charlottesville, VA is a sort of Sunnyvale, CA in my mind - it's about the same mental distance as the craziness going on in the real urban area up north of it, and it has some history with some access to capital (UVA / William & Mary alumni really). Heck, I considered moving there but I consider it still tough for local jobs without the relative drop in cost of living. Granted, where I moved it sunk potential income harder, but the even lower cost of living is critical when bootstrapping companies, and cheap craft beer is a perk few areas where you can buy a great house for under $200k can claim.