Geeks invade Philly: It’s also an HR play

mike-rapp

People in software are different from the rest of us:

They understand sentences like this: “The popular NoSQL database Cassandra eschews a master/slave partitioning design in favor of a fully peer-to-peer model which makes it robust and scalable.”

Later this month, 550 of these people will be in Philadelphia for the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference, a sold-out trade show for the elite in software development sponsored by Chariot Solutions Inc., a software development consulting firm in Fort Washington.

“There’s always a waiting list,” said Michael Rappaport, 48, Chariot Solutions chief executive and founder. “We sell out in the early bird phase.” Speakers include top software executives from Walmart, Mozilla, Urban Outfitters, Google, DataStax, Microsoft, Wingspan and GitHub.

Rappaport sees the April 18-19 conference, which particularly caters to the open-source development community, as an outgrowth of what has become an important management principle at his company: personal growth.

Chariot Solutions employees can spend 10 percent of their time on professional development – going to conferences, taking a paid week off to learn a new language or participate in an open-source experiment, “whatever they are passionate about,” Rappaport said.

Read More