Kevin Zolkiewiecz

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here at Windy City Rails Day 2, standing here actually with Kevin Zolkiewicz, who is one of the organizers for Windy City Rails. In between sessions, he’s taking a little bit of time to talk with us about why he’s involved with Windy City Rails, and how did you actually get involved with Windy City Rails? Well, I started working at Wisdom Group about six years ago, and at the time we did mostly computer networking stuff and dealing with servers, a little bit of web, not too much. And then at that point, Rails was maybe like two years old, so Ray, who is, you know, president of Wisdom Group, he tells a story often how just one day I told him, “Did you ever hear this thing called Ruby on Rails?” Yeah. And, you know, we sort of had a lot of interest in it, Ray was really excited about it, and everything started with Chicago Ruby. So we… We were looking for, you know, is there any good meetups in the Chicago area? We started Chicago Ruby originally in the suburbs, then we expanded downtown, and the idea of, you know, why isn’t there a Ruby on Rails conference in Chicago? So we figured, well, we could just do something simple. We’ll do a one-day conference on Saturday, and, you know, see how it goes from there. Yeah, it seems to have been going pretty well. Yeah, and now it’s… Yeah, this is our fifth year, we’re now a two-day conference. Yeah. And we’re really excited about the progress that we’ve made. So, you know, going from a one-day conference to a two-day conference, I mean, is it literally twice the effort for organization and getting everybody together, or…? You know, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, because, yeah, there’s some… We do need to get more speakers, but as luckily as the conference has gotten more well-known, it’s been easy for us to just go up to people and say, “Hey, you wanna speak at one of these City Rails? What’s your name?” It’s a known quantity. Yeah. So… And most of the administrative stuff doesn’t duplicate for us. One of the big things that I need to make sure I handle the first day is registration, making sure we have badges for everybody. But on the second day, you know, most people have already been here the first day, so there’s just maybe… Just make sure the lights are on. Yeah. Make sure a few people maybe show up on the second day, but it’s… The second day is a lot simpler for us, so… Okay. And, you know, just going back to the user group aspect… You know, when you decided to create… You were looking for… See if there already was a user group from what you described, but you decided to kind of create your own, where there wasn’t. Was there anything going on with the… There was originally in downtown Chicago, there was the Sherb meetup group, and there was a group on meetup that we sort of came across that was running, I think it was like around maybe in Forest Park or around that area in the western suburbs. So the person who was organizing that decided to, you know, he wasn’t able to devote as much time to it. So we figured, “Okay, well, we’ll take that over.” And then eventually, over time, there were some organizational changes going on at Sherb, and we decided to merge the groups together and make one large group. So now we have our main downtown meeting, but we still do a meeting in the suburbs once a month as well. Yeah. And are you guys… Is it like just different… Yeah. …leadership, and you just like coordinate with each other for meetings, or like is it the same people running this downtown and the Chicago version? We kind of split it up. So we got a great couple, Dean and Tracy Cannell, who are doing most of our server meetings now, and then we’ve got a core group of people who handle our downtown meetings. So just, you know, finding speakers, running, you know, the operations of it, which for luckily, a monthly meeting is a lot simpler than a conference. Yeah. So we try to record all of our conferences and get video out there. So you know, we make sure we have somebody who’s recording, and editing, and uploading. Okay, cool. And as far as like the difference between, you kind of said it’s a lot easier to run a monthly meeting versus a conference, because I mean, you have, you said you have the audio, video. I mean, the rig that they have set up is pretty intense. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, you guys have kind of established kind of a rhythm, though, also. Yeah. I mean, that’s… Yeah. Just the fact that you’ve been doing it so many times, I mean, like what each year, do you usually have the same people working each year? Yeah. So you can just kind of have a… Yeah. And we’re really lucky to have people who are very talented in what they do. So we’ve got really talented AV people, really talented IT. I mean, this new venue we’re in is very nice, but it presented a huge challenge to us in terms of internet. Right. Because at the time, this place only had like a one megabit internet connection. Yeah. And for 270 software developers… Yeah, that would just… Yeah, that wouldn’t work out. So we had to do some crazy stuff with microwave, internet signals, and getting tons of extra equipment to get like a really reliable internet connection for the venue. Right. So is that something you set up temporarily for the conference, or is that something that’s gonna be here… I don’t know the exact specifics. I know we have equipment that we just sort of set up on the fly. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I think there’s some bits of infrastructure that will make it a little bit easy for us next year. Yeah. But yeah, that was one of our big challenges this year, though. Yeah. No, that’s interesting. I mean, you had to do some actual technical innovation, which is funny because we’re actually a lot of technical people. You’d be surprised that, you know… Yeah. But, no, that’s really great. So as far as the user group, do you have a lot of people that come from the user group? Do you see a lot of people in the audience here today that you’ve also seen at user group meetings? Is there… It seemed to be like, if you’ve gone to Woody C. Reynolds, you probably also go to Chicago Ruby and vice versa, or do you see a different type of audience coming to the two different events? Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of familiar faces that I see here from the monthly events. But I mean, we get tons of additional people for this as well. So I mean, most of our meetups have grown lately. We usually get at least 100 people now at our downtown one, and just maybe a year or two ago, our average was closer to 50. So those are growing, and then we get, this year we had 270 for Windy City Rails. So a lot of it is people who have been to Chicago Ruby, and then there’s sometimes there’s other people as well, who maybe they’re not involved in Chicago Ruby, but then they attend Windy City Rails, they hear about it, and then maybe they stop by the meetings. Yeah, and having 100 people regularly at a meeting, that’s almost like a mini conference every month to be, in and of itself, I mean, is it the same people coming to those as well? Or do you see a lot of… There’s a lot of turnover in that, the regular attendees. Do you see a lot… Are you seeing a lot of regular attendees month after month after month, or are you seeing new people coming in all the time? Yeah, I mean, I’m always seeing new faces there. I mean, there’s usually a few people that I always recognize who are there every month, but yeah, I mean, there’s people who they’ll come one month, and maybe they’ll skip a month or two. And on our, we have our meetup organized through meetup.com, and I think our numbers are like at 1,700 registered people as part of the Chicago Ruby Meetup there, so I mean, we don’t get all of those people. I mean, some of them, they signed up three years ago, and they never came to the meeting, but we definitely get a good people each month that come out of that pool who attended meetings. Just looking back at all the years, I mean, I just say Windy City Rails is one of my top conferences, SCNA, Chicago Code Camp, because I’m affiliated with that, but Windy City Rails, it’s one that I come to almost every year since the second year. Do you have a favorite, like, moments from one of these conferences that, like, wow, that really was something neat and special that happened at the conference that was something you remember from previous years? Well, I mean, we’ve had a lot of good speakers come through through the years. I mean, the improv that we had yesterday was pretty great. We previewed that at one of our earlier conferences this year. Yeah. It was nice to see that scale with a large audience, and I just love being at a conference and seeing people getting together and meeting people and communicating with each other, because, I mean, that’s, at the end of the day, it’s really what this is all about. Right. I mean, we get speakers here to give these talks, but it’s the networking that people really enjoy. Yeah. And, you know, that’s what we try to foster by making sure we have plenty of opportunities for people to meet people. Okay. Well, again, thank you, Kevin, for taking the time to speak. Sure. No problem. Thanks.