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.
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.
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.
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.
