Bobby Johnson — South Sound .NET

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m standing here with Bobby Johnson from the SouthSound.net Users Group. Hi Bobby, thanks for standing up with me right now. Yeah, no problem. I thought we were all sitting down. Can you tell me a little bit about your User Group and what you guys do? Sure. Actually, I’m not even sure where SouthSound is. Yeah, SouthSound refers to the South Puget Sound. So we’re about 45 miles south of Olympia, Washington. And our User Group meets every second Thursday of the month. Two times a month? Once a month. Oh, I’m sorry. Every second Saturday. Yeah. Sorry, it’s been a long day. Yeah, no problem. Numbers, words, it’s difficult. Okay, so every second? Every second Thursday of the month we get together and we typically have a presenter come down. And that’s what I’m responsible for is I usually book the presenters. Okay. And we have anywhere from… We have anywhere from 10 to 25 local .NET developers. Olympia happens to be the capital of our state, so there’s a lot of state agencies that do .NET development. Okay. So that’s mainly what our audience consists of is state developers. When you say book speakers, are you reaching out to Microsoft or something? Sometimes. Sometimes. I reach out to the local dev community. I’m pretty involved with the Seattle .NET Group as well. Which some of the more high-level .NET developers are kind of involved in that community. So I kind of cherry-pick those guys. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. And so, like I said, I’m not too familiar with Southside. I’m not sure what kind of metropolitan area that is. But you said it’s the capital of Washington, which means I need to go back to fifth grade. But it’s a pretty decent size area. It’s very easy to typically get five to- Anywhere from 15 to 25 people. Oh, from 15 to 25 people. Oh, yeah. So it’s a pretty good representation. Do you typically get repeat attendees? We have a core group of members that show up at every meeting and then kind of a rooming band of thousands that kind of show up whenever they show up. And when you say thousands, I mean you have a pretty large registered member base? Yeah. I believe our mailing list is something like 500 emails. Oh, okay. How many of those are actually live accounts that actually go to somebody? I don’t know. Yeah. So the typical, like if you said you’re booking speakers, I’m assuming that you’re typically doing a presentation style. Yeah. Okay. Do you ever do any hands-on labs? We do. I attempted to do a Randori-style TDD session where basically we had one person guiding somebody at a keyboard, and every two minutes we’d switch off, and we worked our way through the string calculator. Those things are kind of rare for our user group. It’s typically presentations. Okay. And, you know, you said that you kind of can cherry-pick from the alternate group. As being so close to an alternate group, which, you know, they have kind of a unique perspective on user groups themselves, is that affected – well, I guess what I’m trying to say is the user group that you’re in, it’s more of a core Microsoft user group. It’s going to be focused on more of the current Microsoft technologies. Is that safe to say? I would say that the overall feel of the user group is more pragmatic Microsoft developers, so that, you know, they’re probably using – still using .NET 3.5 or earlier. Right. But the content we try to bring down is introducing the new stuff coming out. Okay. So we’re trying to keep them current and encourage them to try to branch out and try the new things as well. And also, since you’re still working closer towards platform, not saying, “Okay, well, it’s on that guy, so I’m going to go off and do something off, away from the mothership.” Sure. Do you have some help from the developer evangelists to get – At Microsoft, yeah. They will definitely provide us software, swag like that, or even hook us up with maybe developers in working groups that we’re interested in here in presentation. Oh, really? Yeah. That would be pretty nice. It is really nice being so close to the Microsoft campus. It’s a curse too, but being that close, we have a steady stream of really qualified speakers. What’s the curse? What’s the downside? Well, the curse is we get a lot of practice speakers. So, yeah, I’ll come down and speak at your user group, but what I’m really doing is I’m just reading my slides to you and – Getting a feel for when I go off to – Yeah, to the bigger conferences and stuff like that. Okay. Well, yeah, it’s a plus or minus. I always thought that user groups were a good test bed for speakers, but maybe if you’re being like the guinea pig of that for Microsoft, that might be a little awkward. Do you leverage anything? I know that Microsoft offers some, and I’ve taken advantage of some myself, user group support services, iNet app. Have you been able to take advantage of those? Yeah. The main leader of our user group is the regional iNet app. I forget what they call it, like sponsor or something like that. Okay. And we have used iNet app funds before to get speakers to our location, so like pay for gas and maybe lodging at times. So, we have taken advantage of that. So, it has been a good thing for you. Yeah. Okay, good. All right. Well, thank you very much, Bobby, for talking with me about the South Sound – .Net users group. – South Sound .Net users group. – South Sound .Net users group in Washington. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.