Cory Foy on Community Building and User-group Organizing | SCNA 2012
Hi, I'm Mike with UGtastic. I'm here again at SCNA. Hi, I'm Mike with UGtastic. I'm here again at SCNA. Corey Foy shares his journey from leading a Chicago-based company to establishing a successful office in Tampa, Florida. He discusses the challenges and opportunities of building a community-focused development practice, emphasizing the importance of fostering craftsmanship, innovation, and learning in the tech industry.
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Hi, I'm Mike with UGtastic. I'm here again at SCNA. Some of them are sitting down with Corey Forey. Corey Forey leads the development practice for AtheLight in Florida, but he has a long history of speaking and teaching, going back to, well, Don Matt and Blackberry days, and you were a consultant there. But AtheLight is really well engaged in the community, or they make great efforts to be engaged. What is it that you're doing down in Florida to take what the culture is of AtheLight in Chicago to Florida?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So I think to answer that, maybe stepping back a little bit of how I came to launch a Florida office of AtheLight. So my previous position, I was doing a tremendous amount of traveling. I did like 50,000 miles in January and February alone.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
In two months?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
In two months, right. A big chunk of that was flights out to India and things like that, but it was still a lot of travel, and I have family, and so we were trying to decide what the next step was going to be, and I have spent a lot of time working with organizations, and I wanted to be in a position where I had the opportunity to influence the technical direction of it if I was going to go work for a product company. And so I did one of the craziest things I've ever done back in like November or December. I did around 21 interviews or 19 interviews in three days. Wow. Or you already used to travel. Well, right. So I flew out on a Monday morning and went to Silicon Valley and spent two days there, and I interviewed with like 11 companies, and then I flew an overnight red-eye to Chicago and interviewed with five or six companies here and different people, kind of exploring what was out there. And the thing that I found was I was interested because it's passionate communities that are out there. We hear a lot about Silicon Valley. We hear a lot about Chicago and New York and Austin, and areas, Denver, things like that. And I wanted to go out there to say maybe I need to be a part of this. Maybe there's something so amazing happening that I have to move my whole family out here. And what I found instead was a lot of smart people doing smart things. There's no doubt about that. But there was nothing that made me say, A, I have to be here. I have to relocate my whole family. And the second thing was I didn't see anything that said that we couldn't do something similar down in Tampa and down in Florida.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right. Right. Are there challenges?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
For sure there's challenges. So it led me to say that what I actually thought my next step was going to be was launch a company down there and bring the practices and principles that I strongly believe in and the value systems of how I think companies should be run to Florida. So then in March, early March, end of February, early March, I had a phone conversation with Micah Martin and Paul Pagel, who run 8th Light.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
And what we decided was, I called them initially just to say, how did you guys get started?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And so over the phone conversation, what we found was there was a lot of, I'll use the word synergy, right? There's a lot of similar value systems between us. And they were trying to figure out how to grow the company and was a geographical growth a good next move for them and who would even do something like that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
And so I kind of just said, hey, you guys ever think about opening a Florida office?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And they're like, maybe we are thinking about that. So in March, we launched the Florida office down there. With just me and we're already up to six people and we're shooting for probably 10 by October. I'm sorry, by summer of next year.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
So what kind of community things have you brought in? What do you identify as between yourself and 8th Light that you're taking down to Florida? What is it that you're doing down there?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So I think there's three key things. I think first of all, for the companies that are down there, we're giving them an option that hasn't existed before. In the Chicago area or in a lot of other areas, there are craftsman shops that exist. We don't see that as much down in Florida, especially in the Tampa area that we're in. So we're giving companies a chance to see there is a company which cares about craft. There is a company which cares about delivering and value and those kinds of things. Secondly, what we're giving is developers down there an opportunity to say there's something other than just maintenance jobs or . NET jobs or Java jobs. There are companies who are out there who want, who, A, care about investing in you, and B, are on the cutting edge of pushing what the technology stack looks like. And I think that the third thing that we're bringing is the opportunity to share with the broader community interesting topics that they may not have otherwise heard of. So, for example, we've already run some code retreats down there. A couple years ago, I ran a Day of Ruby event. So it was a chance to teach people Ruby on Rails from scratch. And we had over 90 people. We'll show up for that. And so bringing, though, like another Ruby on Rails, Haskell 1, Erlang, NoSQL, those kinds of things, we're going to be able to sponsor those kinds of activities and opportunities down there for the broader community. And it sounded like, my next question is going to be, it seemed like well-received, there's been hunger for it, but you said there was 90 people that came out for a first event. That sounds like it was really well-received. It was. And that was a couple years ago before we started the 8th night down there. But there is that hunger, as there is.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Anywhere, right?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
There's not, anytime something new that people, right, developers are the kind of people who are interested in learning.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And when you give them the opportunities, especially safe opportunities to do that, they seem to really want to latch on to that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
And do you have any advice?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
I mean, because you're kind of going into an area that didn't have an established, or at least I don't understand it, they had an established community.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Were there already user groups down there?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
Very much so. So Tampa is a very large Microsoft community. But there is a very active Tampa Ruby users group out of Tampa, led by Jason Frehley and Gavin Stark. And they do a phenomenal job with it. And they, knowing them has been a great asset saying there's a lot of support down there. And we do have some shops that are doing Ruby on Rails. And there tend to be a little, either very small boutique shops or broader, larger corporations that people have brought that concept in. For example, there's a company called WellCare, which is a medical health insurance company, company thing. And there's a guy, Brian Telson, who brought, who now is very involved with the Go programming language, but back then brought Ruby on Rails into the middle of a . net shop. So there are visionaries down there. And what we're trying to do is push forward and say, now there's a company down there who is practicing these principles and values as well. So it's an opportunity to say, this is an example of a company that's doing well, doing these things. Yes, that's correct. And that, okay, and then you can come and learn from us. That's right.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And have you guys done anything like the Aethel Universities that they do here in Chicago, or is that something you're still trying to work out? So it's both. What we do right now is we have an open invite to the community to come for Aethel University, and we streamed the Chicago one, primarily because we're still small and we weren't growing that, and we were trying to decide what we were going to do with it. I think what we're going to start looking into next year is opening up, opening that up broader. We're growing as a larger size group as well. So we'll be doing a mix of in-person plus streaming from the Chicago office. Do you, for somebody that's maybe in an area, it sounds like they did have a pretty robust community after all, but if you're in an area that maybe doesn't have a community, have you, you've been all over. Has there been any place where you could say there's, this is right for community, but they don't have something right now?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
I would have, you would have some advice for how to start making something happen in that area?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So that's a good question. I think that there are places, certainly here at the SCNA conference that we're at. I've talked to people who have very small user groups, three or four people, and they're plugging along with that. And what, in fact, I was speaking two nights ago with the guys who created or who started, oh, they're going to bother me up in Wisconsin. The name completely escaped me for some reason. And they talked about how it grew out of a community effort where they had a very small user group and then they advertised on meetup. com. And I think that that's kind of the thing is people aren't going to go searching out necessarily for a Ruby users group, right? It's saying we're part of a broader technical group. This might be something you would want to be a part of.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
The other thing that we see a lot of our bar camps, right?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So bar camps and code camps, low ceremony, low ceremony things in Tampa. We just had a bar camp code camp. They combined them and there was 1200 people who shut up for it. Wow, which shows that there is a thriving community there.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
And then it's how do we convert that?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
So I think in smaller communities, it's a matter of getting the word out in ways that you might not expect people. People may not search directly for a Haskell users group or Ruby users group doing looking at other users groups and doing presentations there. So going to a dot net users group and saying, hey, let me show you what I am.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Ruby looks like, right?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
I think it was two or three years ago.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
I spoke at Microsoft's mix conference on iron Ruby of all topics, right?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
Right, right in the heart of that of the Microsoft land. And we've seen a shift in not because of my talking.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
No, no, but we've seen a shift in that, right?
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And so I think you're going to see people who are interested in mixing things up and combining efforts to to make interesting thing happen in smaller communities. So that brings us to one of the other topics we talked about was talking to different types, like, Microsoft and this is in the slam on Microsoft. It's just, it's an observation that a dominant developer usually calls themselves a dominant developer, a Java developer calls themselves a Java developer, or I should say even unloaded in the words that a person who works with dot net primarily calls themselves a dot net developer and they start to identify with that platform. A person predominantly works with Java calls themselves a Java developer and they put that and they identify with that. But the Software Craftsmanship, um, uh, conferences are a little bit more polyglot, little bit. We have people that do done that. We have people that do Ruby. We have people that do all different things. So yeah, yeah, and it's a, it's a little more polyglot ish. Is it different when you've gone and spoken to, um, uh, Microsoft oriented conference versus coming to like an SCNA here? Well, so I think, uh, to start off with, it's people identify with the groups. They are out of necessity because those communities tend to reward people who integrate very tightly with those communities and they see a lot of benefits and rewards out of them. One of the things that is interesting about what is actually happened this weekend over SCNA is if you listen to the different talks, what people are finding is that by being influenced by other programming paradigms, they're able to make their own code more pliable and cleaner and faster. Um, so I gave a talk yesterday morning on, uh, learning code. And one of the things I said was even within a code base, you can have different dialects and that's what coding standards are for. But, um, by looking at other paradigms, we influence how well we're able to communicate in our base language. So what the, the big thing that we're seeing in here is the influence of functional languages on object oriented programming. And, and so, so to your point, I think that yes, there is a lot of insular, culture for these conferences. Um, just like here at SCNA, we would probably not open our arms to somebody who was, you know, wanting to say, I do waterfall all the time.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah. Right.
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
And I don't do any tests and I'm awesome.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Cory Foy
community building and user-group organizing
▶ Speaking
Um, there, that, that's a natural part of what it is. And I think you have to look at different things. So it's not so much the community as the individual. And the, my stance on craftsmanship is the responsibility of learning and growing. Is not on the company, but it's on the individual. And so you have to make that decision and have to see that value that by learning different languages and different paradigms, you're going to be able to influence and become a better developer in your own language and in your own culture.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down. Thank you very much.
Critical Insights
durable
"Corey Foy's experience highlights the importance of aligning company values with community engagement."
durable
"The success of Corey's initiative demonstrates the potential for growth and innovation in underrepresented areas of the tech industry."
durable
"Corey's approach to community building shows that investing in education and sharing knowledge can lead to a thriving developer community."