Directory of Rails shops in St. Louis

[ZempTime]

It would be sweet to have a central place listing all the different Rails shops in STL, what they do, and how to get in contact.

This is a pretty straightforward feature from the technical POV, building out a Listing model, with roughly the fields: name, description, contact info.

The interesting part is this: once we have a directory of all the Rails shops, how will that be useful for people? What will people want to use it for? Defining these intents will help us decide exactly what the listing model looks like and what sort of prompt we'll need put in the form to make sure we have a useful directory.

[b264]

This is a great idea. I would make a tiny suggestion and call them Rails contacts or something else that could refer to both shops and individuals collectively.

[clettenberg]

how will that be useful for people?

One question would be who are the people. Would this be a list for other developers looking for companies? Recruiters/businesses looking for potential hires? All of the above?

How could this list address both of those needs? Maybe there needs to be a Members section for Arch Rails members and a Shops or Companies section for rails shops around the city?

[b264]

I would picture it as being for folks who want Rails talent or Rails products-- would be useful because they could have a list of the companies and people for them to contact, all in one place, hopefully. The same list could possibly also be useful for developers stuck on a particularly vexing issue, they could know who to talk to, but I think stack overflow and rubydevelopers slack has that covered. I would not picture companies posting open positions there, at least not in iteration one.

[b264]

How would we protect contact info from bots?

[clettenberg]

:+1:

To prevent from bots, maybe we could just have an :email: icon and then construct the mailto: link on a click event.

[ZempTime]

Bunch of good thinking here. To summate: there will be a variety of Contacts, who can be devs (actual developers), recruiters (like from a recruitment shop), or companies (people who aren't devs doing things on behalf of a business).

And of course, we can add more!

then I think it would be useful to differentiate the design to help with these different intents: seeking a job, contract work, or technical backup, basically all just filtering the Contacts differently based on what would be relevant. But at this point, I think we'll have so few listings in general that it's kind of a moot point, and the more important part will be just getting them in one place and the manual act of connecting people inside the community.

I'll bring this up at the next AR so we can dig in with more brains and perspectives

[ZempTime]

The part of the real world I don't want to reflect yet is being responsible for maintaining the status of who works where in what capacity (ie, Contact belongs_to Company or something like that). For example, my email and that I'm a developer would be equally as useful paired with linkedin info that I work at place 'x' as if I didn't or changed to work at place 'y.' It's useful for all the different intents and doesn't need to be changed.

That said, if it begins to get some utility in that direction and reflecting that info is useful, lets absolutely keep it in mind

[booch]

I had written up a list at one point of companies using Ruby. Probably more than once. This one is dated November 9, 1013:

• Asynchrony
• The Able Few
• InteliSpend
• Varsity Tutors
• AnchorSTL
• Techli Academy
• Concordia Publishing House
• Tunespeak
• Customer Direct
• Kiosite
• Savvis (Cloud API libraries)
• Mercy