Two (2) Reasons Why President Obama is Speaking at Indatus Today

In September 2013, I had coffee with Brian Webb (CTO at Indatus). We talked about Python, Django, Angular, Agile, Laravel, and Objective-C - a caffeine induced flurry of tech jargon. He showed me a well-designed prototype of a mobile app finished the day before. I left Heine Brothers that morning thinking Indatus was doing software the right way. Thoughtful design built with the best tools. A month later I joined Brian's team and now I can let you in on some of the secret ingredients in our recipe. Why do I think President Obama chose to visit Indatus?

1. Design

When the White House staff googled "Indatus Louisville" on Monday they saw what I saw two years ago. A simple, beautiful website with good typography and a consistent color palette. Scrolling a little further they clicked on a lovely Stengel Hill Architecture photo gallery of our new home - the renovated Four Roses Distillery on Whiskey Row. Our website and our space communicate good taste.

Good design is critical. It was critical in President Obama's election campaign. Apple made it a pre-requisite for consumer-facing products. Now we're seeing the ripple effects of that in the enterprise.

Many companies building a product hire an agency to "do creative." That's a cop out. If you're going to take the time to build a product; hire the most creative people you can find, pay them so much that they can't imagine leaving Louisville, and give them power. Power to rename your company. Power to rethink your product. Power to listen closely to your customers, build what they need, and make you look really good.

2. Open Source

If you're a computer programmer, the first thing you see when you google "Indatus Louisville" is our GitHub profile. This is not an accident. It's an important side-effect of our culture. We believe so strongly in open source software that most of our technology stack comes from the open source community. We also write open source software under the MIT license for other companies to use freely.

The open source development model means four things:

1. Release early - We deploy new features multiple times a week.
2. Frequent integration - Each developer makes small improvements to the code base every day.
3. Several versions - Internal product owners see new features first and a small subset of our customers have access to features in a beta release.
4. Modularity - We create large complex systems out of small testable units of code.

This model attracts top talent like moths to a flame. Open source is hot in the software engineering community and the best programmers want to work with the tools that are evolving the fastest. Two frameworks we are using at Indatus are Laravel (PHP) and Angular (JavaScript). The community around projects like these is staggering. Thousands of sharp, friendly people from all over the world creating applications with the same tools. This culture of making new tools and improving tools others have written helps create a strong sense of belonging to something bigger. Programmers rally around their favorite tools, attend the same conferences and band together to fight about ideas on Twitter.

In August, Louisville will host the annual Laravel conference for the first time. Hundreds of open source software developers will gather in our city and Indatus was instrumental in bringing them here. Yesterday, a filmmaker from NYC struck up a conversation with me in the barbershop. "What's the tech scene like in Louisville?" he asked. I rattled off the list of everything we have going on - Code Louisville, tech meetups, Laracon, LVL1 Hacker Space, Creative Mornings, and all the companies in town embracing open source.

The President's visit to Indatus today, and his TechHire Initiative, gives our city a big push in the right direction. Join us. Let's keep our brightest creatives in Louisville, let's grow our start-up culture and build software the open source way.

Source Troy Harvey