The Apprenticeship Move: Dave Hoover on GeekFest and Developer Mentorship

January 07, 2022 • UGtastic Archive

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The Interviewer

Mike Hall

Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

The Guest

Dave Hoover

Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

The Conversation

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

Hi, I'm Mike. I'm sitting here with Dave Hoover from Groupon, formerly of Obtiva. He's the founder of GeekFest, an internal group that started at Obtiva, has grown, and now has migrated over to Groupon. So hi, Dave. Thanks for sitting down.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

Hey, Mike. Hi.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

Can you tell us a little bit about GeekFest and its origins and kind of where it is today?

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

Sure. We started GeekFest in 2007 at Obtiva. It actually didn't start as anything official; it was an official study group. We were studying Ruby refactoring using a draft of the book that was being worked on at the time. There were about three apprentices and a part-time contractor, Victoria Wang, at Obtiva at that point. It was just a time for us to sit down and get away from our code a little bit.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

You were doing Java most of the time back then?

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

Actually, at that time, yeah, because we were all learning Ruby. I'd been doing Ruby for a number of years, but that was like my first full-time year in Ruby. It started as a study group around this book, but as time went on, it just morphed into more general discussion. We'd have people from Obtiva who were out at clients come in and give talks. I remember when Andy came and gave a talk on Scala later in 2007.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

We got into a habit: we would all go out and grab sandwiches from Jimmy John's beforehand and then come back and either hack on fun code, discuss a book, or have a presentation.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

It sounds like an auspicious beginning to something that's now a packed house and a mini-conference. I've noticed over the years that lots of development shops have a lunch-and-learn, but like you're saying, this has morphed. Even the years that I've gone, it's gone from being a few people around a table to a filled room—and that was just when it was still Obtiva.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

When you started to open it up... I remember coming to GeekFest before I even joined Obtiva. It wasn't totally public, but...

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

Well, yeah. Ever since the very beginning, we've always been open to outside people who weren't at Obtiva (and now Groupon). We've always been open to people coming; we just haven't ever had a huge reason to promote it a lot because we always run out of room very quickly.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

About a year after we started, we did feedback surveys for people inside of Obtiva and realized that GeekFest had become this very important part of what we were. At that point, we realized it had become a perk or benefit, so we started buying lunch. Let's get out of this habit of people having to run out and grab lunch and come back; let's just get lunch ordered. We're still doing that today.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

Why do you think that, even though it's so much bigger now, it still maintains that same spirit? How do you keep it in the spirit of the original group?

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

I think the spirit of GeekFest has always been a fairly safe place to go and practice presentations, or use the group as a sounding board for ideas or open-source projects. With the size now, it's more intimidating. I've always wanted it to be a place where a new presenter could come and do their first talk to get some of their jitters out.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

There are still people willing to do that, but it's certainly more intimidating with a room of 80 people. I think we're getting into the mini-conference stage now. But that said, we have an 18-year-old presenting next week on apprenticeship. I'm happy about that.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

I'm also happy that people like Chris McAvoy and Adrian Holovaty came in the last month to present their open-source projects, whether it was Open Badges or Django. I loved Adrian's talk because it wasn't fully baked—he was saying, 'This is something I'm working on; I'm interested in people's reactions.' That's the perfect use of GeekFest: a place to get your ideas out there and engage community interest.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

And that's one of the histories of GeekFest I remember: that people weren't afraid to give their opinion and say, 'I don't know about what you just did.'

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

Yeah. Now that it's been about eight months since the acquisition, we need to do a little bit better job of people speaking up more and interrupting and asking questions. We had a pretty good thing going with that about a year ago.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

One of my favorite memories was Brian Marick coming out and doing a hands-on session where we pretended to be a computer program. I was a button—I said, 'Click.' We had messaging and things; it was a lot of fun. It was a practice for him before going to an Agile conference to work with business users. Do you have any favorite memories like that?

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

Adrian's talk a week ago was definitely a highlight—there were literally people standing outside of the room looking through the glass wall. The fact that probably 95% of the people in the room were Rubyists listening to a guy from the Python community was great.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

I also remember our old friend Fred Polgardy being a superstar of GeekFest in terms of being a critical thinker and asking people to think through things and asking tough questions. I'm just proud that it's continued to go. A lot of that comes from having our apprentices organize it; they provide a lot of enthusiasm.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

That is an interesting thing to bring up: that it's not just something you manage, but something that helps bring the apprentices and students together and gives them an investment in the community. You have people like Ethan who now runs Windy City DB. I'm interviewing him next week and I'll ask him how GeekFest might have given him an introduction to community leadership.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

He was responsible for it back then. I'm proud of that kind of full circle sort of talk.

Mike Hall Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic

GeekFest is here at Groupon in Chicago, called GeekFest West. Every Tuesday, you can go to the Gathers.us site to sign up or follow GeekFest on Twitter. All right, thank you very much, Dave.

Dave Hoover Founder of GeekFest, Author of Apprenticeship Patterns

All right.

Critical Insights

durable

"GeekFest's evolution from a small Ruby refactoring study group at Obtiva to a major internal/external mini-conference at Groupon demonstrates the power of consistent, safe spaces for technical growth."

durable

"Empowering apprentices to lead and organize community events (like GeekFest) provides them with critical leadership skills and a deep investment in the professional community."

durable

"A 'safe' community space is defined by the freedom to present 'half-baked' ideas and receive honest, critical feedback from peers without fear of judgment."

time bound

"The acquisition of Obtiva by Groupon required a deliberate effort to maintain the cultural 'spirit' of GeekFest amidst a significant increase in scale and corporate visibility."

time bound

"Cross-pollination between language communities (e.g., Rubyists attending a Python talk) was a hallmark of the Chicago 'Software Craftsmanship' scene in the early 2010s."