That is the answer I would give: Biggest Smalltalk community in Silicon valley is likely the Lam Research one (dozens of devs). On my blog post talking about Smalltalk, I have 2k views per Smalltalk community-wide audience post, so the community is at least that big. Smalltalk conferences (Smalltalks and Esug) have usually around 200 attendees.
To hire Smalltalk developers, a job offer mail through esug or pharo mailing list is one of the best way to get people to apply, other solutions include giving a 10 min talk at ESUG (Europe) or Smalltalks (Argentina) conference and say loud and clear you are hiring (people may be able to move to other countries). Getting a few developers should not be that hard if you accept remote positions. Migrating from Squeak to Pharo is something to discuss with the developers you hire, things like IoT and Magma DB support might not be easy to port, so it is difficult to tell with the little information provided. Pharo's community is likely the easiest to hire new Smalltalk developers though, and you can check the Pharo consortium website for support and success stories to ease communication with your investors and partners. On Wed, May 2, 2018, 20:21 horrido <horrido.hobb...@gmail.com> wrote: > I received the following message: > > *We started off doing a small project in conservation in South Africa that > involved tracking Rhinos in a remote GPS denied environment and ended up > with some impressive building blocks for a Big Data Platform for IoT. The > platform includes its own GIS subsystem and parts of an Expert System. > > Due to the choice made by my business partner and handful of contractors > the > platform ended up being built in Smalltalk on Squeak VM and the Magma > Object Database. > > We now believe we may have the beginning of a commercial platform however > its notoriously difficult to find Smalltalk developers so I am in half > minds > to migrate to a platform which uses a more mainstream language (Java / > Python) as I have been getting some strange reactions from Angel Investors > / > VCs and mainstream developers. > > ... > > I wanted to ask you if you have information on how big the Smalltalk > community is and whether its better to migrate to Pharo from Squeak and > what > types of recent industrial projects youve come across that use Smalltalk? > > Also I wondered if you know of any active smalltalk group in Silicon Valley > and what are the best forums for professional SmallTalk development.* > > I would very much like to save their project as a Smalltalk project. The > principal issue seems to be finding enough Smalltalk developers. I don't > know if they need on-site developers or if remote developers can pass > muster. I strongly suspect the former. > > How hard would it be to find Smalltalkers willing to work in Silicon > Valley, > or South Africa? > > What is the best response to this person? Thanks. > > > > -- > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html > >
