Developer Community And Conference Conversations: Mike Hall Interviews Eric Kingery

Chicago's PHP community. Chicago PHP community.

Sure, so as I mentioned we started at Chicago's PHP community meetup. That was started about four years ago and we had success but it was just hard to retain people throughout the groups because we had a disparate range of fairly in-depth topics.

And we found a lot of beginners, I think were alienated by some of the more advanced topics we were diving into. Yeah and so we also realized when we were looking for speakers that a lot of the problems that the PHP community deals with and the challenges are not PHP specific. So a lot of languages have web frameworks but more importantly a lot of technologies are outside of the language specific details. So we were interested in MongoDB as well and how to design for mobile and how to use JavaScript effectively. But with a PHP flavor. Exactly but those are problems that people from all communities, all language specific tech communities deal with. So we wanted to broaden the scope and bring in people from all different communities.

And then refocus on not just how to be a better PHP developer but how to think in a way that allows you to be a more effective software professional.

So were you able to but how did that change that dichotomy between advanced topics that go over the head of beginners to being too low-level and also alienating people who are more experienced. Sure so it's just easier to have a wide range of topics on both of those fronts. So in PHP you can only cover the beginnings of PHP so many times without being repetitive and you can cover the beginnings of a wide array of technologies JavaScript HTML CSS design but then also we're expanding it to include just refactoring ideas so right recruiting you know the importance of diversity and technology. We want to go beyond the scope of just one specific language to cater to more people you know both on the beginner level and a more advanced level. There will still be some meetups that more advanced people will want to attend some of the architecture focused ones and you know we want to there will still be a split I think but there's just a much broader range of topics we can cover.

For both both sides. And in as far as like but in keeping with your core membership are you still do you find yourself still doing more stuff with PHP or are you bringing in a different crowd that maybe is totally on something else? We we just rebranded so we've only had one meetup under the One Factor Chicago name and we've got the second one coming up November 16th I believe don't quote me on that. This will be after that. Cool. Okay great so yeah Jen Myers is coming to talk about design and what we found with that challenge of retaining people is that a lot of the well I talked to a lot of the people who had been coming for years and a lot of the core members and they were all open to broadening the scope because oftentimes they had moved on from PHP in their careers as well and so it really just made sense for the core people who were showing up repeatedly and since retain retaining people for me to for me it was a challenge it made sense to just branch on from there.

We may still be PHP centric just based on my network that you know and people's networks who they know but the point is now we can more easily engage someone from the Python community or the Rails community come talk about things that you know might not have been as relevant in the past. Yeah because it's it's interesting it makes me think about there was a debate I had heard about what language should we be using to do presentations that if you go and see a JavaScript presentation or a general topic and you might not be a JavaScript developer but it's about solid principles for say for example and and it's it's presented to you in Java but you're a JavaScript developer and you don't know Java so you know how how what should the expectation be? of the people in the audience and some of the arguments were that if you're a decent developer you should be able to just read code and understand the shape and the pattern but sometimes I found that having something that reduced that that impotence mismatch and saying okay you know the the fundamental concept is is X but if I at least present it in something that's a common idiomatic language is it is that something that you're looking at you know your if you do a presentation is probably going to be with PHP is your sure so the way I would look at that is kind of again splitting it into the audience that you want to speak to so if you're talking about the solid principles and you're introducing them you should be able to do that in a way that's language agnostic right and any language that you put up there should be readable things should be named properly if you can do that in a straightforward way even if someone doesn't know Ruby for example they should be able to pick up on the concepts if it's an introductory talk if you're doing an advanced talk then you know you could cater to JavaScript of Java developers or people who are doing C++ that would be fine and then more advanced people who would be drawn to that talk probably have either been exposed to those languages or would be able to pick up the context from the presentation and still get value out of something that's not in their primary language I just wanting to take a step back and just go back to how you got involved in the PHP community here in Chicago what what's up how did you get involved with the user group you know way back a few years ago sure so I co-founded it with a recruiter actually and we've kind of moved away from that focus and that was another one of the reasons for rebranding we wanted it to be more about the community and what I was at Sitter City okay and I was the Sitter City a company or yeah so they're a startup in Chicago they've got a couple of rounds they were one of the bigger ones along with Threadless was that like a babysitter service exactly they got parents and babysitters online so I was working with the recruiter to staff up our team there after one of the funding rounds and the best move that we made was hiring one of the core Kohana developers which is a PHP web framework that we used to build out a new version of our product and so we started getting involved in the Kohana community and through that community we found people who are involved in the cake community and so it was very web framework centric at the beginning and then we just kind of branched out from there so the nice thing about having any technology specific meetup is the opportunities kind of come in so Rasmus Lierdorf was traveling through Chicago and said where's the PHP user group oh yeah I'd like to present yeah that's like that's an easy win yeah those are a little tougher to come by you know when you rebrand for generic and for the listeners who's who's Russ oh he's a creator of PHP yeah he's the creator of PHP so that's like being at the Ruby group and having mats come or being at the Clojure group and having Rich Hickey come out so it's yeah significant yeah he works for Etsy now oh okay so making you know home home spun PHP yeah and he made good points about frameworks and you know a lot of the things that he was talking about even were applicable so even if PHP is not your main language I think a lot of people would have been interested in that so it poses some challenges because you don't get as easy wins but at the same time I think exposing getting getting that caliber of person to present and exposing them to a wider range of listeners is a good thing I'm a firm believer in listening to people who are creators which is why we're here and and yeah I agree it even if you're a Clojure person and you have a chance to hear somebody's created language and framework that says ubiquitous as PHP you need to listen you know it's they're going to at least tell you something yeah yeah absolutely and the technologies change so fast that even if you're on the cutting edge of say PHP you might have missed server-side javascript and a lot of and now functional languages and yeah you know the advances that the Ruby community's made specifically in micro frameworks and Python the same if you're not paying attention to any of that stuff you're probably missing out and paying attention to what other people are doing is a key fundamental way to advance what you do primarily so for this meetup what we're trying to do is move it into professional software development and software engineering practices because there's a there's kind of a gap between a formal computer science education and even if you come in through Code Academy or you know mobile makers that boot camps yeah exactly Jen Myers is with now yeah exactly so they hope I need that right yeah they teach a lot of valuable things but the software engineering environment is so complex that a lot of things are missed and unless you have a good mentor unless you happen to work for a company who espouses a lot of professional practices you know you can just miss those things so we want to provide an opportunity for people to talk about ways to effectively develop software that aren't covered in classes and may not be covered by their employers or you know maybe they're looking for a job or looking to break into it and we want to teach the basics of things like continuous integration unit testing and these things aren't taught in classes right of course you know in university classes and they're catching up but certainly when I was there they were touching touching any of these things HD the basics of HTTP putting together API's software process a lot of these things you just kind of thrown out there as a professional developer and unless you have the opportunity to come to the conferences like SCNA you can be difficult to pick those things up so we want to expand beyond PHP and talk about how to develop software in a professional environment effectively and so I think we have a better chance doing that in a community with a wider exposure or yeah in the wider wider technology exposure and you know so yeah just refactoring ideas like hiring and you know using things like continuous integration Jen Meyers talking about developers doing design which you know if if you basically getting people away from I'm a PHP developer mindset - I'm a developer mindset yep yeah so bringing that refactoring concept to so refactoring your career overall exactly everything so depth from full stack you know full stack from your from the way you think about it's approaching problems to what tools are now in your in your arsenal for sure because so yeah you're you're missing something if you're a laser focused in in some professions and some careers you know you can do that and you're going really deep and that's fine and we want to learn from those people as well but most people I found in the software profession are benefit benefit more from having a wide exposure and you need that to operate in an ecosystem that's as diverse as most software engineering teams in small to mid-range and even large companies these days so how does somebody find out about when your next meeting is because it's probably gonna be after sure yeah so we just got it on Twitter with the new handle refactord as in Chicago airport okay so refact o-r-e-f-a-c-t yep okay or D okay I get it refactor Chicago refactor D in Chicago but we're on meetup refactor - chicago. com we'll redirect to the meetup site okay great well all those links will be in the in the show notes well thanks again for taking the time to come with me it's great to meet you [Music] you