Developer Community And Conference Conversations: Mike Hall Interviews Sandro Mancuso

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🚀 Discover how the London Software Craftsmanship Group grew from two members to over 400, hosting diverse events like round table discussions and hands-on coding sessions. 🌐 Join the journey of inclusivity and craftsmanship with the Associates Group! 🌟 #softwarecraftsmanship #londonsoftwarecraftsmanship #codingcommunity #associatesgroup #softwaredevelopment
The Interviewer

Mike Hall

Interviewer, UGtastic

The Guest

Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand

developer community and conference conversations

The Conversation

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Hi, I'm Mike. I'm sitting down with Sandro and Tom from the London Software Craftsmanship Group. And, excuse me, Sandro, can you tell us a little bit about London Software Craftsmanship? Sure.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
We started about August 2010. So basically it came up with an idea of myself and a friend of mine, Dave Green. So we used to meet just to talk about software and catch up and stuff. And then all of a sudden we decided maybe it would be great if we could have more people coming along and sharing their ideas. Preferably if they come from other languages as well, not Java. So then we had this idea of having a group of people that could meet regularly. I took this idea to the London Java community and spoke to some of the guys who didn't know anything about craftsmanship, but they loved the idea of having a group of people, different professionals, coming along and having a chat.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
And then they said, "Why don't you create a craftsmanship community then?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
" And they're gonna support you as well, because we would love to attend the meetings. And that's how it started. So that night I went to home, just set up the group at meetup. com, and then we announced our first meeting at there.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
And so you went from two people.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Where are you sitting now with typical attendants?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
Yeah, it's a bit crazy, because like when we started, we didn't know exactly how to start. It's okay, we want to create this group just David and myself.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
So like, where do you go from there?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
And then, because we realize that the people that spoke, that we spoke to, didn't know anything about craftsmanship, we thought, well maybe we could give a talk on craftsmanship.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
If we have like 10 or 15 people attending, that would be great. Well, it turned out that we had more than 100 registering to our first talk. 100. 100. Yes. Yeah, and then we were scared, because we'd never spoken publicly before, so geez, I can't do that. And then, so after that talk, a lot of people were very inspired in the whole thing, the whole craftsmanship thing. And then we decided to go back to our original idea. That was like having a group of people that meet regularly, and then we come up with the round table. So today, after just over a year, we have 429 members. We promoted 23 meetings. We are growing at the speed of 15 to 20 members per month. And yeah, that's about it.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
So you've got a monthly meetup, right?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
That's... We have a few things. We, every Wednesday, every second Wednesday of the month, we have our round table meetings that are by far the most popular. It's limited to 30 people. It's a group discussion. People come along. We put topics on the whiteboard.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Like a mini-on conference?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
Mini-on conference. So we always meet in the same company. There is a company where David used to work for that they... It started on the company that I used to work for. So they pay all the pizzas and beers and stuff. So we have the space after 6:30 until 9:00. So people put the topics. Then they explain what they want to discuss. It can be anything related to software developer, from they want to show a piece of code, or they want to discuss architecture, or how to do a giant distributed teams around the world. Anything. So... And then we vote the most voted topics. We discuss. Sometimes we split it in groups. Sometimes we discuss one topic per night. Sometimes we discuss five.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
So that's the round table. We have every last Wednesday of the month, we have a hands-on coding session. That's limited to 40 people. There's always oversubscribed as well. So we always have people waiting. And we have some spare sporadic meetings. Like we have code retreats. We have talks and other stuff. Regular meetings, we have two. And very soon, we'll have three.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
So two round tables a month. No, it's one round table, one hands-on session. One round...
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
All right. And then with the extremely large group, you know, we were talking a little bit earlier about how it became too much for just two guys to manage. So you wanted to spread that out. That's where Tom comes in with the associates group. Can you explain a little bit about what the associates... And then maybe Tom, you can talk about what you do in that.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
So first, what is the idea of the associates group?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
And then... I can explain what... How it came about. This came from the London Java user group. It has 2,000 members today. So it was too much for just a few people to organize. So they decided to invite some people to... That could contribute, but they don't need the... They are not fully committed. They contribute whenever they can.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Right.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
So Tom was always one of our main members, like, very active members. Yeah, sure. I'm... Yeah, I'm... One of the reasons why I'm an associate is because currently our Software Craftsmanship group is quite heavily sort of Java .NET-based, literally because of the association to the London Java community and other communities. And we don't really have much of a Ruby presence. And so I'm one of those Ruby people that I can talk to other Ruby developers.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
And I know other people in the sort of Ruby industry that would be interested in Software Craftsmanship. So do you have separate meetings for these... Like, is it... Because you said you have a limit of 30, but you have 600 or so registered members.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Do you have a separate meeting for, like, at a different location or something like that, for associate groups?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
Yeah, we meet up as the sort of associate group. We've only had one meeting so far, so we've only done this for one month.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
Where we literally just sit down, discuss ideas, the sort of... The next sort of hands-on sessions that we want to do, who wants to do them, how we can help each other with them.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Okay.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
And all that sort of stuff.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
Yeah, we also discuss, like, the plans for the group as a whole, where we are taking the group. So the whole direction of the group. Because now Dave is moving to Italy, so it's just me from the regional founders. And so the idea that I brought Tom in, as he said, I want diversity. Because Dave and I were Java developers. I want diversity in our socials. So there is a guy from Android community, Tom from Ruby, and then other people from Java. But I want more diversity in there.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
So we discuss the things that Tom talked about, but also where are we going as a group? What do we have in terms of, like, our mentorship program that we want to do?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
The connections to other communities, like, that's what we're doing here. So that's the things that the associates would be discussing. But as I said, there is a difference between the leadership team and the associates. The associates are... They contribute whenever they can. Loads of people, they have great ideas, but they can't commit to the same level like Dave and myself commit. Every month. Sometimes many hours a month. Oh, many hours, yeah. Weeks, because, like, we need to sort out all the venues, all the events. So the idea with the associates is to bring people that want to help, but don't want to commit straight away. And as soon as they start getting more involved, then we'll bring them to the leadership team and they will have, like, full commitment. But they need to see if they want to do that first. So that's why it's important. Yeah, because I've seen that problem where sometimes people are saying, "Yes, I want to do this. " And then they get into it a little while and they're like, "Wow, this is a lot of work. " But maybe I really am not that passionate about this after all. You know, it's interesting for me because I haven't really worked in a community group like this before or been part in this sort of higher level of it. And, yeah, it's really interesting the sort of training that you get from just talking to guys like Sandra and David on, you know, sort of organization and being able to present as well and learning all those skills while also helping out. Yeah, it's very interesting. And I also want to introduce you later on to Ray Hightower who has a very similar model here in Chicago for doing his Ruby community with two main groups in two different cities. But we can talk about that later. And people have already seen his interview. So they know all about what he was doing. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. And you said you were also working with some other -- or you've been in communications. So we're trying to set up communications with some other user groups that are international, some in Paris and Germany and Israel. Can you tell us a little bit how you've been working with those groups to help them or to at least connect and share?
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Sure.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
So when David and I, we sat down last August, we finished our first year as a community. So we had a meeting and said, "Okay, we had an amazing year, amazing first year.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Where do you go from there?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
" So we've done a lot for our community in London. So we made it a reality. But then we realized that we were not doing much for the craftsmanship movement as a whole. So we said, "We need to try to spread that. We need to make craftsmanship flourish, if you like, in other places. " So part of our mission was to go to other conferences in other countries and start sharing our experience because David and I, we couldn't even organize our own birthdays before that, right? We couldn't organize anything. We had no idea what we were doing and how many people would turn up. But we learned a lot in one year in terms of finding venues and sponsors and how to attract members. So a lot of people want to have a local community but they don't have one and they are scared to start one because they don't know what to do. So that was part of our mission. So I ended up going to a craftsmanship conference in Germany and my mission, I started saying, "Let's talk about the communities and what we are doing. " And they had no community there. But then after speaking to loads of people, five of them put themselves forward and said, "We want to learn more. " And then I ran an open space, sharing everything that we've done. And some people said, "Oh, no, not for me. " But a few of them said, "Oh, I'd love to do that. " So they got together, they put in the map where they lived in Germany, so how they could organize that themselves.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
How do we meet in the middle?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
They asked loads of questions and stuff. Certain things we work for them, certain things we probably won't. And then they decided to do it. So there are two communities that just started. One community is starting. So one is in Munich, one is in a city that I'm never confident of the name. And there is one in Frankfurt starting on the 3rd of December. They will have their Code Retreat in the Global Day of Code Retreat. So that would be their kickoff meeting. It's a great way to kick off a self-aggressionship group. So that was Germany. And then, because we were tweeting about the whole thing and communities and helping people, and the guys there blogged about, mentioned my name also, a guy in Paris contacted me. Look, I was following the Twitter and stuff, so I would love to do that in Paris.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Would you help me?
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
I said, "Oh, of course. " And then we spent a few weeks exchanging emails. I was sharing with him everything that we've done, how we've done it. And then he invited me over to do a kickoff. We had a talk in his community. And in the first meeting, they had like 55 people turning up. And now, just a month and a half later, they have 125 members. I think these kinds of stories are fascinating where you have an idea and you just want to sit down and you're like, "Hey, I'm going to do something fun. " And then it just flourishes and then like a flower with pollen, it goes off. And then next thing you know, there's seeds of groups forming in other areas just because.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
They see you doing something cool and then they want to do something cool, too. It's absolutely amazing when you hear things like that.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
There is this guy from Israel. There's a great guy called Yuri Lavik. He runs the Israeli software partnership community. He runs it in a slightly different way than we run ours in terms of community thing. But he's doing a great job there. And he has like 690 members. It's probably the largest community that I know. Yes. But he doesn't have the monthly events. He's more like ad hoc events. But he's doing really well. He's a great, great guy. And then what we've done, we set up a Google group. So I invited all the community leaders in Europe. And then we have now our group. It's still picking up because it's very recent stuff. So that's where we are today. And then hopefully here in the U. S. , we'll be meeting people like yourself and all the other guys and make this connection with the American community.
Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic
Yeah.
Sandro Mancuso, Tom Brand developer community and conference conversations
We're here at SCNA. And it's great getting to sit down and meet and talk with so many other music group leaders. So we're just going to go ahead and wrap it up now. Thank you, Sandro, for sitting down. Thank you very much. Tom, appreciate it very much. Cheers.