Details Emerge

Now what might be compelling, beyond the love of just 'getting back in the game' to truly create a vibrant community? There are several things that I think might be interesting to this new community:

• Startup corner - a place to share ideas, find others to work on it with, mature an idea and launch a new venture
• Giving back - the opportunity to learn new skills (or recapture old ones :) while working to create things for non-profit organizations
• Sharing the wealth - provide mentoring and other support to those just entering the phase of their careers that we've already been living
• Looking out for - something that you can use in your present gig.
• VC - something akin to kick starter, the community owns the products.

It seems that all of these things can be done within the overall construct of the community that I'm hoping will form Corner Office Coding.

Now that I've decided what to do in my spare time, the first thing I have to figure out is what to build this with.

And Here's How It Started

There are a lot of us out in the world these days that used to be software engineers, building systems on mainframes, mini's, PCs or embedded systems. We used to bask in the pure joy of creating something elegant and beautiful using our own fingertips. Then over time we were often promoted to team leadership, where our roles slowly morphed from doing to managing with the ratio of time developing software to developing plans to develop software approaching 100%. Before we knew it, and after a few more 'promotions', our most prominent IDE was powerpoint and we hadn't written a line of code in years.

Over the past few years I've tried to get back in the game, checking out Ruby on Rails to build a web app, Objetive-C to write and release an iPhone application and generally trying to recapture that 'splendor on the glass' of days long since past. What was always missing was a community of people that had been through the same experiences that I had that I could collaborate with (and were not young hot shots half my age and twice as smart) that were ready to dive back into the engineering deep end. If I could only find that community to share with, collaborate with, learn with and participate in the creative endeavor called software development with, I could fill that missing part of my life.

I took several spins around the net and didn't find anything that seemed to fit. There were lots of sites dedicated to creating software, answering questions about coding problems or sites dedicated to learning a new language. While these provide invaluable resources, they didn't really provide the sense of community and shared history that I was looking for.

That's when the idea for Corner Office Coding was born. If I could build a platform for the community that I was looking for, I would accomplish several goals at the same time.

• Build a new platform for the community
• Architect a scalable platform
• Learn another new development language
• Find other folks to build the site with
• Create something elegant and beautiful
• Find some really good UX help

So, it begins...