The doom and gloom professed in stump speeches remains distant from those in the tech sector who are willing to continue learning, investing and giving in their profession.  Professional developers remain agnostic in their choice of languages and platforms because they know both will change.  They learn by watching, googling, doing and staying up all hours of the night building.

One of the greatest rewards in meeting with entrepreneurs seeking home at StartupCity Des Moines is participating in the excitement of an idea’s germination. StartupCity Des Moines remains energized by the ideas and plans permeating the air. We remain cognizant of the importance, however, of the right technical team that can drive the design and development of the product.   We’ve seen startups who’ve come with plans to outsource development to development shops but don’t know how to define the work. Others try to offshore the development process, hoping to leverage the pennies on the $ developers. Both strategies, however, are fraught with danger for the budding entrepreneur who is sleeping, showering, driving and eating while they continually sharpening the idea.  We’ve seen the products produced by developers, designers and business people working together in close proximity for long hours.  We fondly await the return of StartupWeekend in March to experience it again.

There remain many idea people awaiting the right tech team, unsure of their next step.

In the past years of being a member of the tech community, however, I haven’t seen a mechanism to build up the brain trust where  tech and business teams can come together to pursue their passions together. Perhaps the brain trust needs to be built up through training, education or tinkering.  We have the superstar developers in our midst — creating appstore ready iPhone apps in a weekend, launching blogs in hours, releasing webapps in days.  What if this community could grow its base further and seed the need for startup dev teams?  Organically.  Here, in the very prairie that saw 100+ startups show off their stuff at the Startup Fair.

So, StartupCity Des Moines proposes to build it.  We want to invite developers interested in investing time and energy in startups. Keeping with our agnostic roots, we are not setting this up for developers who only know a particular language or are in a specific job or point in their careers. If you are a developer wishing to invest some of your time in learning something new, utilizing it for building equity in a business, this is a call out to you.  If you are a developer with a passion for teaching your trade — be it iOS, .NET, Ruby, Visual Basic, PHP, HTML, Photoshop actions, Excel macros – whatever, we want to hear from you.

StartupCity has the space, the infrastructure and the platform to build this.  We understand some of these sessions may be free, others might cost a few Jacksons.  We’ll get the stuff arranged — and given the community’s passion with startups and technology so far, we know that if we open it up, the interested participate.

We are launching this with a quick conversation on the topic at the Central IA .NET users group congregating at StartupCity on Thu Feb 2nd with the initial session/meetup to follow shortly.  We are looking to you — our developer community to work with us to see if this is what our city and state need – interested?

Comments welcome.

Recruiters — this event is not for you.