For some, the Brooklyn technology community is seen as a bedroom community, where technologists and creatives sleep for cheaper rents before hopping on subway cars or bicycles for jobs in Manhattan skyscrapers.
That happens, of course, but it's just silly to think that's the extent of it.
We've entered an era in which any business or organization must address its mission with technology. That means any place with a degree of density requires a cla** of technologists and the entrepreneurs and creative-cla** ecosystem that supports their impact.
For Brooklyn, that trend also means that the business communities that took root here in the last 20 years, largely in north Brooklyn, have increasingly joined the technical fray. There are the creative and design agencies, the art galleries, warehouses and modern manufacturing facilities.
So a year ago, when Technical.ly Brooklyn, our local technology news site, first launched with a modest happy hour among friends, any questions about why we chose this borough over the city as a whole, if not Manhattan, specifically, were met with confidence and excitement.
There is something happening in Brooklyn, we'd say, and we think daily, dedicated online news coverage of it can help make that become realer, faster.
Today we celebrate one year since we soft-launched our reporting project in Brooklyn, the biggest and likely most dynamic of our growing network of East Coast tech sites, which also includes Philadelphia, Baltimore, Delaware and soon Washington D.C.
Understand, the Brooklyn tech community long predates us. So does the creative-cla** resurgence that came before that. But in a year, we like to think we've added to the conversation and plan on doing more.
In that time, we've found the narrative of how a mature and well-rounded community comes together. Brooklyn tech can stand on its own and, in the future, increasingly will.