Community Building And User-group Organizing: Mike Hall Interviews Culley Smith | SCNA 2012

Yeah, so the users group was geared toward not only students but also professionals on campus. So in Madison, Wisconsin we have MAD Railers which is an established users group and it meets on Monday evenings. The first perspective that we were trying to offer as a MAD Railers group, as well as a lot of other MAD Railers, was to create a user group for other users groups. It's geared towards startup companies, towards enterprises, things like that, but the campus has specific needs. A lot of times they're dealing with not new products, but they're dealing with how to write software with existing things in place. So trying to come in and change the culture to be more Agile, to be more lean, was simply not feasible. It was out of their control. If you have a startup or a business, you might get some headway in doing that. Or if you have a small department, but quite often on campus you didn't even have a department. You had one individual working on a code base. So what we were trying to do was create a resource for the campus to use to say these are some of the products that are being developed across the campus and where are some ways that we can consolidate our efforts and to do some knowledge sharing. Because if someone else is building an application very similar in say the Department of Medicine to something that someone else is doing in the Department of Communications and those people don't have a way to talk, a central location to meet, a lot of times there's going to be wasted efforts. So instead of just having a newsletter, it's like hey let's get everybody together casually let's talk about this cool stuff and then let it naturally let them talk and get to know each other in a less controlled, less structured environments. You're not in a meeting, you're in a user group. Yeah, we started off with just a mailing list. So we were using a mailing list and we found that there was there were some topics that just did not translate well. And we wanted and people also wanted an opportunity to learn. They wanted to go in and see someone present on test-driven development, but not under the preconceived notion that it was going to be something that you were going to be able to implement, but just what are some of the ways that we can start doing test-driven development. And also on campus, even though this was a Ruby on Rails meetup group, we were opening it up to people that were from coming from different backgrounds, from Java, from . NET, from other things. And so it was sort of language agnostic. So even though you were underneath the label of a Rails group, it was, hey, whoever's cool, whoever wants to come in and learn about these things, these concepts, not necessarily Rails, but concepts that are popular on Rails, they were all welcome to come in.

Quite a few people came in just that were doing JavaScript stuff.

So on campuses, mobile is a very big concern right now, writing things for mobile apps, because students are walking around with phones, with tablets from class to class. And so you could either be doing iOS or Android or something for native apps, but a lot of people were building their apps and then just having like a JavaScript framework, like PhoneGap or something like that, so that they could wrap it. So we had quite a few people that were interested in using test-driven development and Agile approaches to the JavaScript side. So when you came out of college and you moved out and you moved on from the school, the university environment, out into a professional environment, I should say, were you, I should say actually, were you a student at the university? I was actually an employee. Oh, you were an employee. Yes.

We had students, and we were trying to expose students, because that was one of the things that we had learned, that a lot of students that were going through a traditional computer science program weren't exposed to things like test-driven development, like Agile, and things like that. They were learning data structures, they were learning things like that, but they weren't understanding how that was going to be implemented.

And the Madison community has a number of startup companies. They have Bendyworks, which is a software consulting shop, and a number of other software consulting, or software startup companies that were wanting to hire people, but there was a huge gap between what the students were actually learning at school and how they were going to be asked to practice it. So yeah, we did reach out to students just to say, well, this is what pair programming is, this is what Agile is, this is what test-driven development is.

There were students that were learning data structures, and schema, and root, and Java, and then coming out and having to figure out how to write up an application.

It's a big gap.

So, but when you came out of working in the university environments into the more traditional business startup culture, what kind of became of the user group on the campus? We needed someone to come in and take over and support it. I think that there are still efforts to get it going, but the problem, I think, is if you don't have someone that, you know, has the vision to get it done.

So, it's still sitting there, and at this time, it's mainly just a practical matter. I don't have the same permissions to book rooms on a campus, so even though I still would have a great interest in doing so, I would need someone on campus. So, it's more of a bureaucracy kind of holding you back.

So, okay.