Interview with Jen Lindner and Milan Dobrota

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m standing here with Jen Lindner and Milan Dobrota, and they’re working with a Tribune company in Chicago, and they’re doing a little, like a user group, a support network called Tribune Tech, and you’re hosting some groups. Can you tell, you said you’ve hosted JS Hack Nights, and you have something planned for Chicago Ruby Testing, yep, Chicago Testing Group, excuse me. So can you tell a little bit about what you guys are doing and what you’re looking to do with the community into the microphone? Sure. So Tribune Technology wants to get engaged in the community, wants to help as much as possible. So we know there’s a lot of great ideas out there, and a lot of people, a lot of, you know, really cool ideas. So if you’re looking for hosting, or if we can help in any other way, make sure you let us know. Tribune Tech, that’s our Twitter username, and we’re also on Facebook, I think it’s facebook.com slash Tribune Technology. And yeah, it’s like, we’re really trying to help the community and help us, because, you know, when people come to us, we get engaged, we get new ideas, new technologies, and that’s good for a company, good for a community, good for everybody. Yeah, so the… The groups that you’ve hosted so far, how did you, you know, come to, are you guys using a lot of JavaScript and Ruby internally? Yes. So you wanted to figure out a way to, like, give back to the community by hosting and bringing people in, or… Well, what happened was the Tribune itself was basically saying, you know, to itself, like, nobody really knows that we do technology here. They don’t know how much we actually use, and we, they have open sourced some gems this year. There’s a lot, like, under Ruby and some interesting JavaScript, too. Yeah. And so they asked for volunteers to basically be, like, an interface to the community. In general, to basically help, you know, support whatever knowledge sharing and a better development culture within technology and to sort of let everybody know what we’re actually doing to support the things that are good. So that’s how we met, and we all started this, like, volunteer thing, and we knew various user groups, and so we started reaching out to people that we knew in the community and saying, like, we’d really like to host, we’d like to, you know, do other things, we’d, you know, come along, and that’s how this ball got rolling. Okay, and so, I mean, have you guys been… The key metric is, are you guys having fun and enjoying it? This is something, this isn’t something coming from corporate, this is something that you guys helped to create, or, I mean, how did, because it’s unique that a company would be saying, hey, how can we figure out how to become more engaged with the community, especially one that’s not known to be a tech company. Yes, so I think that’s a, that’s a, that was a great idea, because they basically came up to us, they said, okay, we need volunteers that are gonna, you know, you’re gonna get a certain number of hours that you can work on. Yeah. And, you know, we’re gonna be improving our culture, you know, connecting with the community, and, you know, just… Join the conferences. They didn’t tell us what to do, they just told us what we could do, and our, we didn’t have any limits. Yeah. So, that’s really cool, like, because everybody’s a volunteer, and we’re so passionate about it, so we were brainstorming a lot, we came up with all these ideas, we came with some internal, Tribune internal ideas. Yeah, the developer hack night shirts, and… Yeah, so… Yeah. So… Yeah. Yeah. So, as far as our external, you know, engagement with the community goes… Yeah. So far, we’re doing hack nights, so, just like you said earlier, we did a couple of JavaScript hack nights on Meteor.js and JavaScript events. Yeah. And we will, we are currently talking to Chicago Ruby testing group organizers, that’s a new group, so… Okay. We hope to host those, too. Okay, well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me, and… Good night. Hopefully, we’ll be able to send some people your way. Cool. Thanks. Thanks.