 |
| Brian Dailey Realm 3 Web Applications |
What brought you to Nashville?
After living in New York for three years, I decided to relocate my business to a more family friendly city. I visited several different cities (in North Carolina and Georgia) before deciding that Nashville had the combination of vibrant businesses and living that I was looking for.
What is your favorite venue to go to in Nashville?
My wife and I have spent a lot of time in Centennial Park during the three months that we’ve lived here. We’ve enjoyed the live theater and music at the band shell, as well as the dog park.
What surprised you most about our city?
I work primarily the open source branch of the technology world, and I expected most of the businesses in Nashville to be slow in adopting open source. To the contrary, many of the growing businesses here have embraced the open source movement and it seems to be a growing trend. I find that encouraging.
How does the Technology Community here compare to where you lived previously?
It’s not entirely fair to compare a city of one million with one of eight million, but Nashville certainly holds its own for its size. Adjusting for population, the involvement in user groups has been just as high if not higher than in New York.
In areas like the Silicon Alley and Valley there is a larger drive to chase down funds for new startups, but those areas tend to be hubs of activity since there is a heavy presence of money and new ideas. It’s more difficult to find that in a city like Nashville; as the city continues growing, more venues that connect great ideas with funding will rise to fill that need. While open source adoption in Nashville is encouraging, there’s still a large opportunity to share the advantages of embracing open source software with the industries of the heartland (healthcare among them).
Do you have any recommendations for other technologists who are new to the area?
Get involved! There are a legion of opportunities in the Nashville area to get to know your fellow technologists. The geek breakfasts, language user groups, and obviously the Nashville Technology Council are just the beginning. The more that people are involved, the more the city will stand out on the map! Creativity and inventiveness is something that grows as the creative class of Nashville interacts with one another.
