Ethan Gunderson & Ryan Briones — Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Hi, I’m Mike, sitting down again with Ryan Breones and Ethan Gunderson. These Guys Created gathers us, it’s a website for managing user group information, user group events, and also are the founders of the Chicago DB user group. Thanks Ryan and Ethan for sitting down, again. We had a little technical snafu beforehand. So, what we discussed earlier is that gathers us had a pretty interesting origin, that it was based off of a need that you had in creating Chicago DB. Can you describe a little bit about some of the inception of gathers us and what that is? I mean, it’s used for several user groups, I’ve used it myself, and I know GeekFest uses it. It’s a great success and you get a lot of sign ups. Yeah. I mean, well over a hundred each week. But how did gathers us come out of Chicago DB? There were two major things that happened. One, we were too cheap to use a tool that costs money. There’s a couple of them out there, a big one. Which was kind of the biggest impetus for us to create our own, especially when we kind of had this idea for the group, but we didn’t know how it was going to, if it was going to be successful or not. We didn’t want to pay money for something that wasn’t going to have legs and go on. Kind of the second thing though, a personal gripe of mine is that a lot of other meeting websites, in order to attend an event, they force you to sign up and actually have an account with their site before you can attend that event, and so it was another big design goal with gathers us. Was to make it dead simple. Yeah. To both create an event and attend an event. Only the information you need to provide is your first name, last name, and email, and then you can attend an event. Do you ever have any problem with spam, because it’s so easy to get in there? Yes. I mean, I know you have a captcha out there. That’s the reason why. Okay. And has that actually been effective? It hasn’t happened since we introduced it. Oh, good. But like you said, it was… Born out of a need when you were creating ChicagoDB. So the question I asked earlier was what database did you end up using? I’m considering that you’re a database group, and that would be kind of a critical question. What database is gathers us built on? So the database we used is Mongo for no particular reason whatsoever. Yes. Other than I won an argument. Okay. And some of the things that you learned in creating gathers us were those things that you were able to kind of bring back into the meeting. So you start off, you want to have a user group about databases and about learning database technologies. So you create a site to support that, you pick the database, and did you learn anything about and were you able to bring that back into what you were sharing with the group? Yeah. We never did anything with the group on it. I did give two talks at Mongo conferences about the data strategies that we used for storing our data. Because at the time, which was probably the biggest pain point using Mongo, is that almost none of that was documented. Everyone was using their own. Yeah. So you were on the bleeding edge. Yeah. Right there. And that’s the thing about being on the bleeding edge is you bleed. It’s painful. So going into the group, you founded a group about, you said, about two years ago. Two or three, yeah. Yeah. And what kind of format did you follow when you were doing actual meetings? What was the typical structure of a meeting? Well, kind of as illustrated as the inception of gathers us is that was kind of our, like, the reason why we had to create a group like this is because we essentially decided on using Mongo kind of just out of a, like, it might as well have been flipping a coin or something like that. We had no idea why Mongo would be better than any other database. And so what our goals were were to design a group that was focused around this deep learning of what makes a particular database better than another, understand the core of that. So that we could apply that to our normal day-to-day stuff. You know, there’s a lot of good talent in Chicago, a lot of people that have had experience both with modern non-relational databases and people that have a lot of experience building applications on relational databases as well. So we figured that in a selfish way, we could kind of leech off of the knowledge that’s here in Chicago and kind of take that to the next level. So we did that in two different ways. The format of the group was kind of designed around that. Like every user group, we had a portion of the group that’s kind of like a face-forward presentation style part where someone would talk about technology or something like that. But to start out the night, we would do, we would read these database white papers that would kind of give us some kind of deep knowledge about a particular technology. Like Dynamo, or Bigtable, or something like that. And kind of maybe set the stage for what we were going to talk about later that day. Okay. And anything really interesting that you learned from reading these white papers yourself? Or anything that was kind of surprising about that? What did I say earlier? So the biggest thing for me was the realization that basically no new ideas. Have come out of database theory in the last 35 years. So things like the Dynamo paper are just a group of ideas presented slightly differently. But they’re all 35 years old. Yeah. And then you also mentioned something about the specificity of some of the original or the modern NoSQL implementations came out of really specific concerns. Like the Dynamo being the shipping cart back end from Amazon. Now it’s got millions of things bolted onto it. Right. You have full databases that are built around that paper, both from Amazon and from competition. And looking at the, trying to cover these technical white papers, it’s a very large undertaking even just when you’re trying to understand yourself and get your hands around these white papers. Yeah. And how did you get people to read these papers month to month? Was that something that was easy to do? Did you have lots of people saying, “Yes, I want to read this paper and give an hour long presentation on its contents?” Or was that a challenge? It was a challenge. Yeah. I mean, most of the time people would not read the paper. And kind of one of the things we wanted to do is, you know, it would be rough for us to be the ones that kind of like led the discussion. We wanted to do it every month and be the only voices in the group. So we tried to get people to volunteer to do it. We had a couple of good core members that would kind of step up from time to time to do that. But essentially trying to get people to volunteer to lead the discussion on a particular paper was rough. Yeah. And kind of you joked earlier that maybe you don’t necessarily even understand it all yourself. And also you’re trying to present it to a bunch of other people. Which is probably why we had a hard time getting people to volunteer. Like no one wants to try to lead a discussion about a topic that they don’t truly understand. Yeah. And a lot of those white papers are hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’re very technical written a long time ago. Yes. And very ivory tower-ish. Lots of math. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of math. That’s interesting. Do you have a meeting? We’re going to get Jake in with that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the papers, you said they were very tough and that people would be trying to come in and present on these papers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The issue that we’ve kind of had with bringing vendors in is that they’re more or less interested in converting you to use their database, which usually leads to more of a sales pitchy kind of presentation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s really hard to get a vendor to tell you the trade-offs that you’re making. Right. Right. So, you’re going to be working with a group, or how is that going forward into the future of ChicagoDB? It hasn’t been totally decided yet what’ll happen. The interest in the group has died out a little bit, and I think that’s mostly due to specialized user groups forming. We have a React, Hadoop, basically any relatively still popular NoSQL database has its own user group in Chicago now. Right. But even though it was really difficult to do the white-list, it’s still a good thing. The white papers are still my favorite part of the group, and so I’ve been tossing around the idea of doing a general computer science white paper user group. Okay. Yeah. So, you can see the same kind of fracturing. So, I could understand that would be kind of frustrating, whereas you started with trying to understand the core tenants that could be applied to any of those database systems. Now, people have kind of segregated themselves. Yeah. Yeah. themselves by their platform. I can see that might be kind of frustrating or do you think it’s a good thing? I don’t mind it. Like Ryan said the whole purpose of the group was so that we could learn and I learned. So that’s all I care about. So go with you. Go with you. And have something very cool out of it. I gather it’s very popular. Well thank you very much for sitting down Ryan. I don’t want to keep you guys from your chicken. Thank you very much. Thanks.