Joe Hirn

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here at Chicago WebConf with uTask again. I’m sitting here with Joe Hearn. Joe runs the Chicago Closure Group here in, well, also Chicago. So, Joe, thanks for sitting down. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing at the Chicago Closure Group and what do you do at a functional user group? Sure. What’s the parentheses in there? Yes, there’s some parentheses. Now, there’s parentheses in every language. That’s unfair. It just matters where they’re at. Only one position actually changes for the parentheses, but at the Chicago Closure Group, of course, we do closure. It’s a programming user group that we started back in March of 2010. I was at ThoughtWorks at the time and it was actually Michael Norton who had reached out to people that were local in, you know, internal at ThoughtWorks that wanted help to run the user group. I said, great. Then he moved off to his wonderful venture over there at Lean Dog and left to me the group, which was awesome. I’m thrilled to be running it. Closure was a real eye-opener to me. I was primarily a Java developer before that and I was very confident with all my design patterns and, you know, my IDE foo was really through the roof and closure had always interested me just because of the simple fact I had a really hard time grokking it and learning how to use it and be powerful with it, but every time a piece of code was explained to me, I was amazed at how expressive it was. Yeah. So, I started the user group having really no Lisp experience, no closure experience whatsoever, but I started it because I wanted to have at least some sort of interaction with it and the community. So, it gave you kind of a learning experience. Like, you were like, oh, I’d like to learn this, but instead of just going and huddling with a book and, you know, going into a tiny hole and trying to learn it, you said, let’s learn together. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, I’m sure, you know, when you were learning stuff before, you may have done that huddle and just hunker down and learn versus, like, was it better doing, were you able to learn faster by working with other people or was it faster to learn just kind of on your own? I’m the type of person that learns basically through interactions with people better than any other way. I’m very keen aesthetic in that form. But I also love to teach as well. So, although my closure skills are very remedial, I’ve had some great, great presenters that just, you know, blow me away and through the roof fantastic. But I also enjoy seeing, you know, people who are as new as I was to closure coming in and just, you know, helping them set up a REPL and helping them get their environment started. Usually, the user groups where I send somebody home with a functioning REPL and maybe a few code examples, they are the most rewarding to me. I feel fantastic about that. And I’ve even seen a few people. I’ve joined the group, I’ve helped them set up a REPL, and they’re now contributors to major open source portions of closure and whatnot. So, some of it is it’s not that only geniuses are going to be able to come in and pick up something like a Lisp variant like closure, but people who have the potential to be geniuses, they just need to get over some of those initial hurdles. Yeah, it is. And I think that even people in the community will sort of say that there’s that sort of initial hump to getting over sort of the development workflow. People aren’t used to necessarily. Working in a very heavily REPL driven environment, even though, you know, Ruby has the great IRB and everything like that, sort of doing the whole, you know, REPL red green refactor is sort of like that extra step that I feel like closure developers when they are doing TDD kind of toss in there because you just it’s just so interactive. And I mean, there’s even this idea of being able to have your production systems, you know, with a REPL open where you could do hot patches on the fly and that kind of stuff. I wish I had more production experience with closure. Yeah. But just. The type of things like that, the dynamic properties of the language blow me away. So you started this group to kind of fill a need for yourself and not just for learning, but for, you know, community. And you said that working with people has been that have gone from zero to productive has been the most rewarding. So you’re kind of a natural desire for teaching. You know, has. Your ability to teach increased alongside your ability to write closure as you’ve as you’ve been working with the group over the last two years. Sure. I mean, I don’t really want to say I started the group necessarily for myself. I did have a selfish interest in learning the language. But I do love to. I do. I do love to. And I always have loved to teach people, you know, whatever it is that I can learn because of the simple fact that I like to be taught because that’s the way that I learn best. So, you know, each one teach one and we can all get better. OK, well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down with me. OK, thank you. Thank you.