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Ask HN: What's the best way to meet other developers to collaborate with?

4 points by sfard ↗ HN
I'm in the unfortunate (and sometimes fortunate) position of being a developer with a business background. The unfortunate part is that while my background (former strategy consultant, banker, and product manager) has given me a pretty solid "businessy" network, now that I mostly design/build stuff, I don't have as many developers in my network as I would like. What are some good ways to meet more likeminded developers who'd be interested in collaborating with me or building a business?

I have things that I want to build, but they're ambitious enough projects that I'd be hard pressed to build them on my own, not to mention my skillset is more front-end and design heavy (Django/Javascript/html/css etc) and I want to work with someone who has a stronger fundamental backend and data architecture skillset.

I've tried going to some meetups, but frankly they've been flops. It's like half SEO experts and Wordpress guys. No disrespect to them, but I'm looking for more of a hacker than that. I figure the most talented people are probably taken or busy doing their own thing. I don't want to be one of those stereotypical guys cold-emailing developers with "an amazing idea... all you have to do is build it". And I don't like the idea of outsourcing stuff on odesk.

Any tips? Are there online communities I can join for this kind of thing?

Thanks in advance, everyone.

3 comments

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alook
A few ideas.

1) Try to be more selective with the meetups you attend. Particularly, meetups focused around a programming language or a specific technology (Python/Hadoop/Node.js/etc) are likely to have more dedicated technical attendees. Bonus points if the meetup doesn't allow vendors/recruiters - that generally means that they like to keep the conversations focused on technology, rather than sales or job offers.

2) Hackathons. It's often encouraged to show up without an idea, form a team, and work on an idea for 24-48 hours. This is a great way to test-drive a partnership with someone who you might invite to work on a side-project. Chances are, by the end of the hackathon, there's mutual respect/trust among team members; the bonds you form by hacking together for a day or two are going to be far more conducive to working on new projects than the bond between you and your twitter followers.

3) Open-source projects. Pick an open-source project that you find particularly interesting. Sign up for the developer and user mailing lists, ask questions and answer them where you can. If you ask the developers where a good place to start helping out is, they'll often give you some easy ways to help out (improving logging / documentation / code style is often an easy first patch).

Hope this helps!

sfard
This is very helpful, thank you.

I never thought of going to hackathons or helping on open source projects.

gvb
[A]nswer [questions] where you can. - especially this. Most questions can be answered fairly readily with some research in the code. This is triply beneficial:

1. You learn a lot more about the code by directed research than by random or linear reading.

2. You will earn respect and a good reputation on the list, assuming you do good research.

3. When you are wrong, someone will correct you http://xkcd.com/386/ and both you and the original questioner will learn from that.

Ironically, I've found quite often a question will go unanswered for days, but when I post an answer it often stimulates others to respond with clarifications, expansions, and corrections that they otherwise would not have posted.