Florida Creatives – Creating a Community of Innovation

Here's an interesting story about the Orlando community showing off its coat of many colors. It came to a head yesterday when a friend of mine called me looking for work because he'd been phased out of his job.

Damien McKenna is a delightful Irish programmer I first met at one of the first ever CFPHP meeting at Starbuck's in Winter Park. At the time Mike G's group was just a special interest group of the now-defunct Refresh Orlando. I had recently gotten an office job, and they were looking to replace their web development team with me. The thing is, they were trying to replace the people in charge of all public facing parts of their business with one 24-year-old generalist. I needed help.

I had checked out some of the local meetup.com groups, and wasn't super-excited about any of them, but the message boards were a useful place to pick up or announce jobs. There was one guy on there looking for some extra cash named Damien, so I talked to him about this office project, and if nothing else, I knew I'd found an intelligent and motivated guy. He was already working heavily with ColdFusion and PHP and said he was learning Rails too. Who does that? McKenna.

Since that time, Damien has been blogging like crazy about issues like project management, web development, hosting and a mess of interesting stuff. He's really taking the time to make sure other people can learn from his experiences, always experimenting with and sharing some interesting stuff.

The original job I contacted him about never worked out, but we stayed in touch, and have worked together on a few projects now. Seeing him at BarCamp was a welcome change, since he lives in Sanford and all our communication is over phone, email and IM. He's proven to be a very competent and timely worker, and excellent at troubleshooting. That's why it was so disheartening to hear about his situation.

Supporting a wife and two babies is no small task, but Damien was doing well with his full-time job and some side work. Then his company decided to outsource the development and maintenance of their web page, and Damien quickly found himself jobless with 3 extra mouths to feed.

By noon on the day after he found out, he told me he wasn't very worried at all about supporting his family.

This community has got some very healthy connections happening, and that's been proven several times this week. Damien has now been hooked up with a couple of projects that needed two extra hands, and all in less than a day's time. We're growing so fast here in Florida, far away from the hustle of New York and San Francisco. We've still got a ways to go, but the speed at which Damien was able to get connected with some pay was truly head-spinning.

How was this possible? Here's a guy who wasn't worried about his job, but is active in the community because of his interest in learning and networking. Suddenly he's got a situation and there was no hesitation on the part of his friends and relations to help him out.

Had it not been for meetup, Refresh and some very short-sighted guys at my job, we wouldn't have met and this blog post wouldn't have been written. The inspiration for the post was unfortunate, but the message is inspiring. We do have a real community, let it not be said otherwise.

If you've got something to add to this story or a story, leave a comment, and maybe I'll edit "The Ballad of Damien" to include your experience. If you've got your own story to share or that of a friend, ask me for a blog account and I'll hook you up.