Eric MacAdie

Hi, I’m Mike with Eucatastic, standing here at the Windy City Rails with Eric McKady, who runs the Chicago Java Users Group, and he’s starting up the Chicago Ruby Testing Group. Hi, Eric. Thanks for taking a moment to talk with me. So, going from Java to Ruby, that sounds like kind of those communities are notoriously different. So, what’s been your experience between the two? Well, a lot of the Java jobs here in Chicago tend to be with a lot of trading firms and a lot of more established, like, insurance firms. And Ruby is, and there are some startups here that use it. I mean, I was with a startup that used Java for a while, and there’s a guy here. If you guys know anything from Grubhub, they’re kind of a startup. And then, you know, Ruby is, so like I said, you know, Java is on one side of the, predominantly on one side of that continuum, and Ruby is a little more on the other side, like a lot of startups. So, you don’t. You don’t see too many startups using Java, but you see a few. But then you also see Ruby starting to get into established companies as well. And, like I said, you know, Java is really big in the finance space here in Chicago. There’s a lot of trading firms. The Jug is hosted at CME, mostly. I have a contact there. If he says there’s no space available, I’ve got to scramble. But, yeah, they tend to do a lot of stuff. And if we get… Especially if we get some, like, low-level… Like, a guy from Oracle came and talked about, like, memory garbage collection. And that was packed. Yeah. When you say packed, what’s packed? Well, we use Gathers Us for RSVPs right now. And we have a limit of 50 since we’re free. And so, usually, we hit that limit. You had to wait and list it. And then, yeah, one time we also had to start another event. And then CME also does it internally. And so, we get, like, maybe 50, 60 people. When I started running… See Jug, we were meeting up in Loyola, you know, near John Hancock. And we were getting, like… In addition to the speaker, like, maybe two or three people. Yeah. And then I moved… And, you know, I’m finding they say, like, in real estate, location is the most important thing. Right. That’s true for user groups because we went to ThoughtWorks for a while. We had a few more people. And then I moved it to CME, which a lot of people like because, you know, you’ve got a lot of people working the loop. And they live out in the suburbs. And so, CME is, like, right in between. And so, it’s, you know, a lot of people have said they love it. We did release a survey on SurveyMonkey. Only 12 people responded. And there were a few people who said they didn’t like CME, but they didn’t have any… They keep coming. Well, it must not have been the same people that like it. I mean, most people like it. But, like I said, I mean, location is definitely an important thing. And I talked to someone in Sears Tower. And I was kind of like, I don’t think I want… You know, people don’t want to get patted down just for a lecture. Right. I mean, CME is, like I said, I mean, Josh Bennett is my contact. And he’s really been great and really helped us out a lot. Okay, great. And so, what has driven you to want to go towards creating this Ruby testing group? I mean, because there’s a lot of testing coolness going on inside of Java with Makito and some really neat stuff going on in there. Well, I personally am getting more into Ruby. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I’m running the Java group now because… Honestly, I think if I were to just drop it, it would die. So, I’m trying to find someone to replace it. And there does seem to be demand for a Java group here in Chicago. It is a little frustrating because nobody ever wants to run it. Right. As you know, running a group. But, you know, like I said, we’ve had meetings where we’ve had quite a few people show up. So, like I said, there’s definitely demand for a Java group in Chicago. And I’ve just been going more to the Ruby groups. And, you know, I was at Bank of America for a while. And I got laid off. And, like, everybody I knew was at the bank. I had, like, no technology social network. I had, like, rebuilt it from scratch. And so, I started going to somebody. I just went to a Ruby meeting. And then things eventually kind of rolled on from there. And so, like I said, I’m getting into the Ruby world. And as far as starting a Ruby testing group, you know, I also went through Code Academy. And, you know, everyone talks about how, you know, you should always write your tests first for all your code, for your applications. But nobody really spends much time talking about testing. You go to the different meetings. Like, the last one was about… The last one was about Ruby Motion. Yeah. How often do you have a meeting about R-Spype or something? Right. You know, and I’m running it with another Code Academy alumni, Alfonso Rush. We’re kind of retooling it right now. But kind of a little… We want to start back up again. But we just kind of thought, you know, like everyone talks about you should code test first. You know, maybe you should do languages test framework first. Yeah, that’s interesting. Learn the language via the testing framework. I don’t know if that’s really practical. But that’s kind of a thought that occurred to us. Because, like, you know, in Code Academy, you get people like Alfonso and I who have been to other languages and are using the kind of transition to Rails. And then you also have people who are like, well, now it’s Starter League. Yeah. And then you have people who know nothing about coding. And… But they don’t really cover testing very much. Of course, all the employers want testing. So we’re trying to, you know, like build like a little curriculum to kind of lead people through R-Spype since that’s kind of the main… Definitely seems to predominate more in the test units. Right. And we’re hosted right now at a company called Open Software Integrators, which is primarily a Java shop, ironically. Because one of their founders is a guy named Andrew Oliver. He was down in North Carolina. He wrote the POI framework, which is a Java framework that lets Java developers read and write office files. They open an office here in Chicago. And I just met the guy who runs the Chicago office. His name is Patrick French. And he really wants to help build the community as well. And so they’re hosting it. And so, yeah, we’re kind of, you know, of course, testing can have a lot of religion. You know, there’s people like DHH. Like half the time he’s tweeting about how much he hates R-Spype, right? Right, right. We’re going with R-Spype because it’s definitely more predominant. And, you know, like I said, coming together with like a curriculum. And we’re trying to even like maybe get some people in local people, you know, I know someone at Backstop who said he’d be willing to come talk about mocking. You know, kind of like give little lectures about their experiences. And the guy who started Gathers Us, a couple of them were at Optiva. And then it became Groupon. And one of them blogged that they started because not only did they want some that did RSVPs, but they also wanted to get experience with Capybara. And so we’ll have them come in and maybe talk. And so we’re trying to get like some, we want it to be like maybe a six-week course. So you’re thinking more or less just a formal user group, but more of a study and learn group. Kind of a, yeah, that’s kind of because like nobody really, they don’t seem to be too many tutorial groups in a sense. I mean, it’s usually kind of like come on, this, you know, we’re on the third Tuesday of the month and we’re going to talk about this and then we’re all going to disperse for another month. And so if you do like more of a tutorial, it’s like if somebody misses a month, a week, they’re kind of behind. And then we also thought about looking at the RSPEC book. And then one of the things about the RSPEC book is, of course, if you’ve looked at it, the first section is all about cucumber practice. It’s like, why is it called the RSPEC book? Of course, David Chalupski is here. Maybe he can answer that question. So we’re kind of retooling things and, you know. But if you don’t mind, I’m going to jump back to what you said earlier about the networking aspect of it, that you were working in a company and you had so much invested in those people and those relationships at the company that once that’s gone away, you’re like, oh, I have no network. And where it’s user groups and conferences, you get to meet people and talk to people and build up that kind of network. I mean, is that something that’s looking back at? You know, the Java group has been useful in the past, that you knew people. It’s helped. It’s also kind of let me, you know, if you run a group, you kind of have what you call president’s privilege in a sense that I can, I’m a kind of introverted guy. I feel a little more comfortable walking up to a group leader and saying, hey, I run the Java group, you know, like talking to Ray Hightower. Yeah, you have something to talk about. You know, because I mean, I think the stereotype, and this is kind of true for me, is like a lot of developers are kind of introverted. It’s like, because I actually, and sometimes when I’m at the Java group, you know, I will kind of like. I introduce myself to people and thank you for coming. And then I was at another event, completely, you know, not related to technology, and I was kind of sitting off the corner by myself. I’m like, I should be able to talk to people. And I stopped myself. I’m like, that would seem really weird. Yeah. If some guy just introduced. So, like, it’s okay for me as the host of the leader of the Java group. Yeah. So, as far as networking, yeah, like I said, I mean, a lot of the other banks, I mean, I would be going to the Java group for a while. But a lot of the people, I was like the only bank person there. Yeah. So, like I said, it was kind of almost like these two separate worlds in a way. But, yeah, like I said, it was kind of hard rebuilding it from scratch and going to user groups really helps. And, you know, like I said, it’s kind of a cliche being involved in a user group helps. You know, running a user group, it’s sometimes like living paycheck to paycheck. Yeah. It’s like, okay, I got someone for next month. Yeah. And then, like, you know, two weeks, two weeks before the presentation, it’s like, I need someone. But one thing that’s happened. One thing that’s happened is you do it over time, you know, eventually people kind of start coming to you. Yeah. And that’s one of the problems that I’ve seen in user groups is that people, they start a user group and then after a few months, they realize it’s kind of hard to get people to cooperate, to people to do what you need. But once you’ve gotten through that initial trial period, you start to build up and then people sort of recognize, oh, this group has been around a little while. So, sometimes powering through it, you know, those lean times. Yeah. Yeah, the Java group, we kind of have the advantage. We only have to come up with actually 10 presentations a year because we meet the third Tuesday, so no one’s going to come in December. Yeah. And then October, we have, there’s the no-fluff-just stuff, which is like, it’s kind of like, there’s a guy in Colorado, his name’s Jay Zimmerman, and he basically, his company does, they put on like little mini Java ones throughout the country. And what he does is he will send, excuse me, speakers to Java groups throughout the country and raffle off a couple of tickets. Yeah. So, October, he sends someone out to a group. So, that’s one month we don’t have to do anything. Right. And so, we just have to come, excuse me, it was a project with like 10, and I’m sure the Ruby group probably doesn’t meet in January because they’re the first Tuesday and it’s so close to the new year. Yeah. So, I would say if you start a user group, try to be at the end of the month or the beginning of the month because it’s actually a little less work that way. Oh, okay. Yeah, I, personally, I run right in smack dab in the middle of the month, so I guess I haven’t caught that. And I’ve noticed people love to do things on Tuesdays. Yeah, yeah, Tuesdays is a problem. It’s always, even if I do things. It’s like non-tech related. Like, I kind of thought about going to, like, looking into, like, going to some Buddhist meditation groups and they’re like, Tuesday, Tuesday. Everybody does everything on Tuesday. I don’t know what it is about Tuesday. Yeah. So. I hadn’t thought about it, but the, my group has been more successful on Tuesdays as well. So, yeah. Well, anyway, thank you very much, Eric, for taking the time to talk with me.