Is Cali a nice place to be Web Developer

Well, my first thougth was NO, but taking my time to think about it, mmmm… NO.

Being a developer is not just stay in home and code all night long with tons of coffee, but being part of a developers community to share code, experience, ideas and why not beer.

This is the weakest part of Cali, the community is too small, too newbie, does not exists. With a quick search on Meetup in Cali exists groups like:

Some of them are active communities. But there is a fact with these communities, only the organizer worries about it, the members, are just members, they are not community members, which supposed to be people who collaborate with Meetup’s talks content or feedback.

On the other side, talking about business, here in Cali Colombia, the pages just can’t be more cheap: you can find web pages from $400.000COP (~$200USD) and small size application from $900.000COP (~$450USD) some of them are low quality products and the good ones can’t compete, the competition is too unfair. The customers do not have, some of them of course, the knowledge about development to know the difference between low and high code quality, they only think about design and here in Cali are tons of good designers.

To wrap it up

We need to be active members of communities and collaborate, not only here in Cali, but in others open source projects on GitHub, there are a ton of them, that put the name of Cali as a Developers City on the list.

And start to generate valuable portfolio and profit. That is a difficult thing but not impossible, our clients are interested now more than ever in have outstanding web sites and applications. And want to pay for it.

Originally published at juliancantillo.me on February 13, 2015.