Sean Massa & Todd Larsen

Hi, I’m Mike with Yooktastic sitting here with Sean Massa and Todd Larson who are involved with the Chicago Node.js community. Hi guys, can you tell a little bit about what you guys are doing with Node here in Chicago? Yeah, sure. The group started in about March of 2011 so I think we’ve had like 16 meetups so far so it’s not really new but it’s not really that old either. It’s like middle-aged for a user group. I suppose it is. But we do have like over 450 registered members too so it’s definitely something that the community has been interested in since we started it. But yeah, we just get together every month and talk about what’s going on with Node, what people are working on, what packages are coming out, what philosophies people are coming up with in conventions and stuff like that. Node is one of those communities that’s really come up really fast. Oh yeah, super fast. Faster than Ruby, but I mean I just kind of wonder if some of that is because people have been doing JavaScript so they had already kind of accepted JavaScript but now it’s just, oh I can do some more with the language. Has that been something? Do you get a lot of people who have like a lot of JavaScript experience but know Nodes, that want to learn Node? I mean what’s kind of the audience? What I’ve kind of noticed is it’s actually more people that come from other maybe back-end technologies wanting to learn about Node. There are definitely people that have transitioned from like front-end, strictly front-end development, doing JavaScript and now they kind of want to move into the back-end sort of things. Yeah. Yeah, but they also you’ll get the people who just do a little bit of JavaScript, maybe just some jQuery stuff, and then Node actually legitimizes JavaScript for them and they still have to get more interested in, not just Node, but even like more advanced like client-side libraries. Okay, and you know that also, do you have like a more mixed audience at your meetings? Because your Node, like Ruby doesn’t have the greatest story on Windows, but Node seems to have been really embraced by like Azure, like I know the Azure group and they run Node. Do you get a more of a mixed bag of attendees? Oh yeah. We have actually a surprising amount of Windows people that come in. Yeah. It’s definitely, you know, Linux people, because Node is multi-platform, that’s one of the big selling points, we definitely get a bigger spread of people. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so a little bit more mixing in this. Yeah, and a large spread of skill level as well. It’s not just like people who are hardcore into Node when it first came out, it’s some people who never touched it and some people who’ve written their own packages. Okay, do you guys do you guys do any hack meetings or is it mostly like presentation style? We’re trying to switch it up a little bit. We’ve done some workshops. Yeah, we did the open source workshop that you led that went really well. I think it seems like our most popular one so far has been the full stack. And then some of our packages, the package show-and-tell where people can come and kind of get a broader view of the current state of Node.js. Okay, yeah. And you know, Sean, you have a background working with Alt.NET. Todd, I don’t know what your background is, but you know, how does this community, how have you seen, can you describe at all maybe the difference you’ve seen going to Alt.NET meetings versus Node meetings? Like is there been a different vibe aside from maybe it’s a little fresher and newer? Yeah, a little bit. In a lot of ways they’re sort of similar, like it’s a little bit more pragmatic and a little bit more thinking up front, I think. But I felt that Alt.NET was more like we don’t have to do everything with the official Microsoft packages, whereas Node is we don’t have to do anything with anyone’s packages. I’m just gonna make this tiny little package for this thing that I need or just consume this other tiny little package. It’s all that Unix philosophy. Like do one thing and do it well. Just small things? Yeah. Okay. That’s been really helpful for the community, I think, because you, people do make these large frameworks, like people have tried to replicate Rails and Node.js and stuff like that. Is it the Express? Express is a really thin layer. Okay. But they’ve gone like way beyond that and tried to, like really you could write code that looks like it’s Rails code almost in CoffeeScript, for example. Cool. But I mean those things are gonna pop up regardless, but I think the overall community is really focused. on like the smaller bits. Like I’m just going to write an Express app, which is analogous to Sinatra and Ruby. Right. And then just pull in the tiny pieces I need instead of starting with some overarching framework. Do you typically meet, just back to the meeting format, do you typically meet once a month? Like what’s the ballpark? Where do you guys meet at? We do once a month, but at the rate of things changing. Sometimes it feels like we should do them more frequently. But yeah, we stick to once a month, third Tuesday every month? Yeah, third Tuesday. Tuesday of every month. And now there’s also the Chicago JavaScript. Do you have any cross-pollination with what they’re doing? I mean, or is there enough crossover in the topics? We haven’t had any sort of official crossover. It’s definitely something that we’ve been wanting to do, but I guess I just sort of forgot about it. You see a lot of same faces. Yeah. You will, yeah. Yeah, there’s definitely a 10E overlap. Okay. Yeah, but it’s different enough, like no JS versus the client-side frameworks. Yeah. Also, like one’s more focused on front-end-y UX implementation. More traditional uses of JavaScript. Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much guys for taking the time to talk to me. Thanks for having us. Sure.