As a wise man once said, “strange things are afoot at the Circle K”. If you haven’t noticed, things are starting to move pretty fast in Nashville. This past year we had 5 community run events/conferences, a user group holiday party, and many other smaller events including user group meetups and hack nights. Some would call it a banner year for Nashville’s developers. However, as awesome as the past year was, there are still some pretty big questions floating around:

• How do we find developers to fill the positions that are available in Nashville?
• How do we keep the developers we have from leaving?
• How do we compete with other regions in such a competitive market?
• Basically, how do we as a community, as employers, as a city encourage and retain developers here in Nashville?

The simple answer is community/culture. We have to continue building our community and culture into something the developers want to be a part of. So how do we do that, what are some of the steps we can take? Below I’ve outlined a few ideas I’ve had that I think will help us continue the growth that we are seeing now.

We need to encourage the continued growth of the developer community. Developers want to be around other developers. It doesn’t matter how many “cool” places to hang out are created in Nashville, if we don’t have a strong and vibrant community, we won’t attract the people that we want and need. We have a growing culture around the user groups within Nashville that is encouraging cross platform and cross language collaboration. The user groups offer education, comradery, and connections that allow developers to flourish. We as a larger community should get behind the user groups and help support them. They are on the ground level in helping attract and keep developers in Nashville. The more successful they are, the more successful our city will become.

We can also focus on developing a culture of acceptance, use, and contributing to open source software. Open source is big and is only getting bigger. In Nashville alone, there are 603 people who are contributing code in some form or another on Github.com, a code sharing and collaboration website with a focus on open source software. There are 400 people who have at least 1 or more public repositories. Open source is both a boon to developers and to companies alike. It allows both to showcase interesting ideas they are working on, as well as use the greater community to build something that resource wise would be unattainable in a closed source project.

As I said above, we are at a crossroads. The need for developers is at an all time high and only growing. Our best bet is to continue to encourage the growth at the grassroots level, to showcase our town through the developers that already live here. Let’s continue to grow the culture and community and see where we can go.

2013 Goals

Instead of resolutions, I try to set some personal goals each year. Some years it works, some years it doesn’t. Last year I had 2 primary goals and I feel like I achieved each. The first was to end the year weighing under 200 pounds for the first time since high school. I’m happy to report that as of yesterday morning I weight 184 lbs, so unless I somehow consumed a significant amount of food while sleeping last night I met that goal. My second goal was to help organize a local conference. It wasn’t quite a conference, but I did help run the Nashville Hack Day, a one day event where developers came together to hangout and share ideas.

Because I was successful with two goals last year, I’m upping the game for 2013. Below I’ve jotted some goals for this year.

• Run in at least 4 races, including a 1/2 marathon.

  Over the past year I’ve been running and really enjoying it. Last year the only race I ran was the Pycon 5k. In addition to repeating that race this year, I’m also planning on running the Ellie’s Run for Africa race in Nashville and the Firecracker 5k in Brentwood, TN. Along with the 5k races, I’m also planning on trying to finish the Country Music 1/2 Marathon.

• Practice Building a product.

  I’ve been playing around with an idea, called buckit.io, for the past few weeks. This next year I want to focus on taking the idea and making it a product. The longer I work as a developer, the more interested I’ve become in not only the technical execution, but also the other details that entail creating a full fledged product.

• Help others learn the practice of development

  There are some very cool things happening in the Nashville technology scene. I had the pleasure to be somewhat involved in the Nashville Software School this past year. For 2013, I want to be much more invloved as a mentor.

  Alongside the NSS, the other goal I have with regards to helping others is to run a python workshop. I don’t know the details yet, but I want to help introduce python to more people in the Nashville area.

• Enjoy my family

  My final goal for 2013 is to spend more time enjoying my family. Over the past year, we’ve discovered how much we enjoying getting outside and getting away from technological overload. So for 2013, we want to spend more time at Radnor Lake, Percy Warner park and others. Alongside getting out and enjoying the family, I can’t wait to get to know that newest addition to our family, who will be joining us sometime in June.

I recently had some people ask questions about installing django

install distribute:

curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
sudo python distribute_setup.py
(optional) -  you can remove distribute_setup.py

install pip:

sudo easy_install pip

install virtualenv:

sudo pip install virtualenv

activate virtualenv:

mkdir -p ~/envs
cd ~/envs
virtualenv --no-site-packages --distribute django-env
source ~/envs/django-env/bin/activate

install django

pip install django

create new django project

cd ~/
django-admin.py start project newproj