Aaron Brazell: technologist moves back to Baltimore after stints in Austin and D.C.

Don’t look now, but a technologist is moving back to Baltimore, specifically for its gung-ho startup community.
As Aaron Brazell — author of the WordPress Bible and co-founder at WP Engine hosting services — wrote on his Technosailor.com blog this month, it’s the growth of Charm City’s tech community that is bringing him back to a city he left in 2008.

I watched Baltimore grow as a technology community … over the last 4 years and realized Baltimore was coming into its own. It had successes. It had failures. It had investors. It had bootstrap. It’s still not entirely cohesive, but from my seat, it looks promising.

Promising compared to how Baltimore’s tech scene looked barely two years ago, as writer Amy Dusto observed in her Johns Hopkins University thesis: in early 2011, TechBreakfast wasn’t the monthly force it now is for new startups, OpenBaltimore was still an idea and civic hackathons were nonexistent.
But while Brazell’s words about Baltimore are encouraging (“HEY, EVERYBODY, WE GOT ANOTHER ONE!”), work remains, as 410 Labs co-founder Dave Troy spelled out in a post on Quora in October. Writing about this city’s “digital roadmap,” Troy noted that Baltimore “underperforms” compared to its peers worldwide.