Luke Melia on Community: The Secret Weapon of Recruiting

In Action with Wendy

Luke Melia is a software developer, co-founder/CTO of Yapp who loves building great teams and communities. Luke helped create the first GORUCO and the Ember.js community in NYC.

In this podcast, Luke discusses Yapp’s early adoption of Ember.js, and its impact on revenue, community and recruiting. We dive into building community, unique takeaways about Ruby, and the many benefits of community. This is a great talk for people interested in speaking, teams who need to grow, and leaders who want to infuse a vision into their culture.

Ember History

Adopted Ember from Sproutcore

Ember consulting funds Yapp

Ember.js meeting up NYC has over 1100 people

Ruby is Unique Community

No big corp behind community, the driving force was individual

Motivation, style, stems from roots

Community takes responsibility to fix problems

Lessons from Ruby Community

Matz is nice and so we are nice

People talking about it made it true

Took into Ember — together we help folks climb the learning curve

After a while you are saying the same words and instead of vision it becomes true

Impact of Community on Hiring

First crack at folks as they come onto the market

Apprenticeship programs

Find talent, be attractive to talent

Talented devs don’t come onto the market… they reach out to a few friends and have a new job

Other Ramblings

Lightening talk great introduction to public speaking

Differences between Silicon Beach and Silicon Alley

Historian Role

Community Builder? Ping @lukemelia on twitter

Tweet @embernyc to find out where they are going for drinks the evening of a meetup