Gangplank

Nerds Welcome… and I am a nerd! I walk in the door the place is buzzing with energy! people are having side conversations about Flash, Flex, Ruby on Rails, Java WordPress and just about every thing else web related. There are a bunch of people across the room past the fooseball table and the old school arcade video games playing guitar hero on a Wii.  It’s wednesday. It’s Hacknight! and i am at gangplank. What is gangplank?

In its most general sense, Gangplank is a set of beliefs:

  • We believe that Phoenix can be a fantastic center for innovation—once committed.
  • We believe that web professionals should focus on collaboration over competition, and that ideas should be shared freely.
  • We believe that small businesses, micro-businesses, and freelancers, bridged together in common cause, will be the core of this revolution in Phoenix.

Gangplank is basicly a part of a larger movement of smaller freelance companies working in colocated office spaces.  I was introduced to this concept when a friend of mine from out of town visted and said that she was off to work?  I figured she was going the local starbucks or some other local coffee shop. Nope, she was heading to gangplank. My friend was in town for 20 mins. and had already found a quite place to work with like mined freelancers and small business’s startups and the cost for her to work there for the day was FREE? How could this be? Our visting desinger class decided to investigate gangplank and get to the bottom of this.

Hanging out there as a class was kinda strange. A lot of the guys had reservations about why we where there and what our motives truly where. A few things really stood out from our discussions there.


I always felt that academics tend to talk down about technical developers and that technical developers don’t typically do the same. Well I was wrong. I guess that is a door that swings both ways! A few of the developers there seemed to think that having a college education was not that important to being a web developer. while i agree that a college degree is by no means required to achieve success as a web designer. It was just funny to me to here the designers and developers go back and forth. No you don’t need to go to college or art school to learn Photoshop, Illustrator, Css Etc…But the true benifit of college is the interaction you have with other like minded students and what you learn from each other. Our conversations ping ponged back and forth about; college vs self taught, designer, development and client issues. It felt good to know that others are going through the same kind of issues that I do as a freelancer, kinda like free group therapy.

After the class left I decide to stick around for a while and meet some of the people there.  I got into a hour long discussion with another Flash developer about Flash vs Flex and which is good for what. We shared sites exchanged twitter handles, and just like that it was his turn on the “Guitar Hero” mic so we said our goodbyes. Funy these

s are the kind of discussions that used to happend on a college campus. And here is a group of people that just simply love what they do and given the chance would love to share that knowledge with anyone willing to listen…

I think that designers and developers need to sit down and play video games, eat pizza, drink coffee talk about code, talk about design, whatever. We both seem to benefit from such interactions. I learned the true benifits of flex vs flash and my new friend was able to gain insite on data visualization and design ideas for an upcoming project from me.

If you are a freelance web designer or developer dying for some human contact in the Phoenix metro area. Gang plank is a cool spot to stop by and get a liitle work done and chit chat about what is happening in the interactive world.