The Frictionless Web: Gathers.us and the Reality of 2012 NoSQL:…

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Hi, I'm Mike, sitting down again with Ryan Briones and Ethan Gunderson. These guys created Gathers Us, it's a website for managing user group information, or 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 in?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

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, I mean well over 100 each week.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

But how did Gathers Us come out of Chicago DB?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Well, 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 lot of them out there, 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, you know, if it was going to be successful or not, we didn't want to pay money for something that was just going to be, that wasn't going to like 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 there's another big like design goal with Gathers Us was to make it dead simple to both create an event and attend an event. Only information you need to provide is your first name, last name and email and then, you know, you can attend an event.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Do you ever have any problem with spam because it's so easy to get in there?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Yes. I mean, I know you have a CAPTCHA out there. That's the reason why.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Okay. And has that actually been effective?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

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 Chicago DB.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

So the question I asked earlier was what database did you end up using?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

I'm considering that you're a database group and that would be kind of a critical question.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

What database is Gathers Us built on?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

So the database, sorry, the database we used is Mongo for no particular reason whatsoever. Yes. Other than I want an argument.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Okay.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

And some of the things that you learn in creating Gathers Us were those things that you were able to kind of bring back into the meetings. 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, you know, 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.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

So you were on the bleeding edge.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

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 know, you founded a group about what you said about two years ago. Two or three, yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

And what kind of format did you follow when you were doing actual meetings? What was the typical structure of a meeting?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Well, kind of, as illustrated as, you know, the inception of Gathersoss is, that was kind of our, like, the reason why we had to create a group like this is because, you know, 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, you know. 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 like this deep learning of, you know, what makes a particular database better than another, understand like the core of that so that we could apply that to our normal day-to-day stuff. And, 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. Uh, the format of the group was kind of designed around that. Uh, like every user group, we had a portion of the group that's kind of like a face forward, uh, presentation style, um, uh, part where someone would talk about technology or something like that. Uh, but to start out the night, we would, uh, do, um, we would read these database white papers, um, that would kind of give us some kind of deep knowledge about, uh, a particular technology like, uh, dynamo or big table or, uh, something like that. Um, and, uh, kind of maybe set the stage for what we were going to talk about later that day.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Okay.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

And anything really interesting in that you, you learned from reading these white papers yourself with, or anything that was kind of surprising about that? So the biggest thing for me was the realization that basically no, no new ideas have come out of database theory in the last 35 years.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

So things like the dynamo paper are just a group of ideas presented slightly differently. Um, but they're all 35 years old.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

You also mentioned something about the, the, the specificity of, of some of the original, um, or the modern NoSQL implementations came out of really specific concerns like the dynamo being the shipping cart, uh, backend from Amazon. Now it's got millions of things bolted onto it.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

You have, you have full databases that are built around that paper, um, both from Amazon and from competition. Um, and, uh, you know, looking at, uh, um, at the, trying to cover these technical white papers, it's, it's, it's a very large undertaking, even just when you're trying to understand yourself and grab, uh, get your hands around these white papers, getting people to read these papers month to month.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Did, is that, uh, something that was easy to do?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Did you have lots of people saying, yes, I'm going to read this paper and give an hour long presentation on, on its contents or was that a challenge? Uh, it was a challenge.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

I mean, most of the time people would not read the paper and, uh, kind of the, one of the things we wanted to do is, you know, it was, would be rough for us to be the ones that, um, kind of like led the discussion every month and be the only one, the only voices in the group. So we tried to get people to volunteer to do, and we had a couple of good core, um, uh, members that would kind of step up from time to time to do that. But, um, uh, essentially, uh, trying to get people to volunteer, um, to lead the discussion on, um, on a particular paper was, uh, rough.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

And kind of, you joked it earlier that it's maybe, you don't necessarily even understand it all yourself. And then all of a sudden 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.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Like no one wants to try to lead a discussion about a topic that they don't truly understand.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

And a lot of those white papers are hard.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

It's, yeah, they're very, they're very technical written a lot of time ago. Yes. And very ivory tower-ish. Lots of math.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah. Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

There's a lot of math. That's interesting. The...

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Oh, do you have a meeting? We're gonna get chicken with that? Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Crap. Uh, go. All right. All right. So, the, uh, you know, the papers, you know, you said they were very tough and the people would be trying to, uh, to come in and, uh, and present on these papers.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Uh, have you looked at any other formats, like bringing in vendors or anything?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Was there anything you learned trying to maybe reach out to a Mongo company or a, like, and get them to come in?

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Have you, did you do anything like that? Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Uh, we've had people from 10-gen, um, I don't think we've had anyone from Basho. Membase. Membase. Um... The, the issue that we've kind of had with bringing vendors in is that they're more or less interested in, like, converting you to use their database.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Which is usually leads to more of like a sales pitchy kind of presentation instead of, like, a low-level technical talk. Mm-hmm.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Like, it's really hard to get a vendor to tell you the trade-offs that you're making.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right. Right. Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

And it's like, no, it's totally not in their best interest to do that.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right. So, what is the future, right?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Do you have, uh, plans for, for reviving the group or how is, how is, how is...

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

looking forward to the future of, uh, Chicago DB?

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

I don't... It hasn't been totally decided yet what'll happen. Um, the interest in the group has died out a little bit. And I think that's mostly due to, like, specialized user groups forming. Mm-hmm. Like, we have a React, Hadoop, basically any relatively still popular NoSQL database has its own user group in Chicago now.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Um, but what I, what I, even though it was really difficult to do, the white papers are still, uh, my favorite part about the group, um, and so I've been tossing around the idea of doing a general computer science white paper user group. Oh, okay. Um. Yeah, but, so you can see the same kind of fracturing, and so I could understand that would be, uh, kind of frustrating is, uh, 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 by their platform.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Right.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

And that's, uh, I could see that might be kind of frustrating, or, uh, do you think it's a good thing, or? I don't mind it.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Um, like Ryan said, the, the whole purpose of the group was so that we could learn, and I learned. Uh, so, that's all I care about. So, go for it. So call it to you.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Yeah.

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones Gathers.us and ChicagoDB

Go for it to you. And then you can have something very cool out of it. I gather results, it's very popular, so.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic

Well, um, thank you very much for sitting down, Ryan. I don't want to keep you guys from your chicken. Thank you very much. Thanks.

Mike Hall

Ethan Gunderson, Ryan Briones

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