It’s alive. Not much to blog yet, but we’re on the 2014 kick.

One recent blog that really set me pondering about Sharing Craft was this one, by my colleague Donnie Berkholz, DevOps and cloud: A view from outside the Bay Area bubble. Do we need to be in the same city or location to share craft?

“In the Bay Area, I saw the same thing that’s endemic of the area. There’s a clear best way to do things, pretty much everyone is aware of it, and that’s what everyone does. Thanks to the heavy startup presence, there’s much less inertia in terms of existing cultures or infrastructure, so changes are easier. When you’ve got a next-door neighbor doing something amazing, it’s very hard to resist the peer pressure and the local culture, so everyone’s doing The Right Thing™. Very similar things hold true in the open-source world, where neighbors may be virtual but they’re still highly visible.

In Austin, it was an entirely different story. I saw yet another example of how the rest of the IT world, at least in this country, lives. I’ve seen it in places like Minnesota, Maine, and Oregon. It’s a world where trendy software vendors and startups don’t represent any meaningful part of the tech community, where businesses mostly don’t yet realize that software is eating the world.”

San Francisco is able to have a Right Way because everyone knows each other. There are events every night of the week and everyone is socialising and hacking together. Craft is shared in bars, coder dojos, and startup spaces. This intensity of network is one of the reasons so many entrepreneurs around the world want to go to SF – its still the best place in the world to learn about building web sites at scale. But things are changing, as we code more, and the future becomes more evenly distributed.

I want to get under the skin of these issues at Monki Gras 2014.