Sergio Pereira — Chicago Alt.NET

Hi, this is Mike Hall, sitting down with Sergio Pereira. He runs the Chicago Alt.net user group and I’m just going to ask him a few questions about his group. We’ll start off with, well, what is Chicago Alt.net? So, it’s very hard to define what Alt.net is. I’m not going to dare try to define it. It’s something that people want to define when they’re starting Alt.net. But I can give a few traits that could more or less describe the group. So, I think we are mostly developers that are going after the continuous improvement and improvement of self or processes. And also the quality of the software that you write. We like to think we are not necessarily .net developers, but we are developers that happen to use .net a lot, probably like .net a lot. And I think we try to also give a little bit of a voice to things that are good practices, good components, good methodologies that may or may not . come from Microsoft. It may or may not even be .net necessarily, so we try to give space for those things to be talked about. So, it isn’t just about technologies that are related to Microsoft and .net, but things like testing and things like that? Okay, so, you know, that was Alt.net, but how do people find out about your user group? Do they have a site? Yeah, so, well, we do have our site. We have chicagoalt.net. Yeah, what’s more like to that? We have an account on Twitter. We have a mailing list. In reality, this site and all the communications are mostly about our events and meetings. There’s no propaganda of any type of thing there. It’s really just about the group events. But you can find out by subscribing several ways. I mean, I think the site has everything you need to know to get info about the group. Well, so, you know, we can contact you via the site or via the Twitter. You said that there’s a mailing list. I’m sure all that’s linked through the site. It’s all on the site. There’s a calendar. There’s everything there. Okay, and so, what is your, kind of, your meeting schedule? Do you hold regular meetings? It’s a monthly, bi-weekly? How do you do it? Yeah, we have a monthly meeting. We almost always meet on the second Wednesday of the month. We meet on the Sears Towers, Willys Towers at Red Point Technologies. It’s usually, well, I guess we start at 6:30 on those days, and it’s once a month. Why do you go to 6:30? Why 6:30? Which is 6, 5 o’clock, 8 o’clock? I think, you know, I don’t really know why. It just has always been 6:30. I guess it’s not too bad for people that work in the city, and it’s viable for people that are catching the train from the suburbs. What typically do you see at a meeting? Like, what is, do you have, I mean, you’ve been doing this a while. How about over the last couple years, how many people have you typically seen? Do you see, like, a few people, or is it? I think an average meeting would have, like, 25 people. We have capacity of about 50, and we hit that several times, but normally it’s really around

1. So it’s a good-sized, I think, group for anyone that even has not necessarily given talks to other user groups, so I think I encourage our members to give talks, because they probably give talks to their, you know, development teams at work, and it’s just a little bit of a next step to bring their talks to our user group. Okay, so, I mean, you try to not just bring in external speakers, but you’re trying to cultivate speakers inside the group. I think, so, especially in .NET, .NET’s a funny, .NET developers are a funny type of developers. I mean, they have grown up being told what tools to use, how to do things, mostly by Microsoft. There’s not a, you know, it kind of comes with the territory. I mean, you work, .NET’s a popular platform in businesses and enterprise, and it kind of comes with the kind of developers that you end up having in .NET, and so there are not a lot of .NET speakers. They’re into non-Microsoft things. Some are, but they don’t talk about it. There’s no venues for them to talk about it, so one way to change that, we believe, is one of the charters of our group, is to create more speakers within the community, and so we really try to get our members to be encouraged to present on topics, and how often you’re going to find a .NET user group that we invite you to talk about and hibernate, or go sharp. I don’t want Ruby to be mine, but, you know. For a few years now, why do you do it? Why do you continue to work with it and maintain it? So, yeah, so we started this group in late 2007. We had a few formal meetings with myself, Derek Whitaker, JDM, and then we had more, you know, get together with more people. I think you might have attended some of those, and I think for me, it’s the opportunity to participate in the process of changing the .NET developer type of definition or stereotype. You know, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in your average .NET developer. I don’t like the terminology, but in reality, that’s what it is, and I think that over the last four years, not because of my group, of course not, but I’ve seen so many changes in .NET. Visual Studio now shipped with jQuery, really, that’s huge if you look back four years. So there are many things changing. Microsoft has an MVC platform. A bunch of those things changed over the last four years because of feedback and pressure from people. Some of those were associated with .NET back then, and I think that makes the .NET developer a better developer, you know, having access to things that are just normal in other platforms. So you enjoy being able to give developers who might not otherwise have an opportunity to voice their thoughts and ideas and what they’re passionate about, a platform, to come and learn about other people’s passions and to also share their own. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. You know, see how test-driven development is done, how behavior-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not part of the .NET culture. It varies by organization, of course. There’s always good places that do the right things, but it’s not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, and even .NET technologies as well, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not part of the .NET culture. It varies by organization, of course. There’s always good places that do the right things, but it’s not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, and even .NET technologies as well, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not part of the .NET culture. It varies by organization, of course. There’s always good places that do the right things, but it’s not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, and even .NET technologies as well, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, and even .NET technologies as well, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, you know, see how test-driven development works. So many people don’t know those things because it’s just not the group. And I think that by having those people come and see ideas from other platforms, other groups of developers brought to .NET, or fish ball, whatever. And the first few words, then people start leaving after the presentation, because that’s really what they’re there for, is the presentation. So we kind of cut on the discussions after. We try to start food early, so people can mingle and network and talk about things, and just have a presentation at the end. I think that’s what most people are interested in seeing. It’s funny, because they are interested in seeing that, and they, for whatever reason, they like someone to be there to select topics, the participation. They like to curate it. Yes. The .NET meetings are very different from the Chicago Ruby meetings. I mean, it’s not like people go in the mailing list and they offer talks, and they volunteer to do talks. Or discuss what the next topic will be. For whatever reason that I don’t know, that just doesn’t really work well. Maybe it’s just we didn’t figure out how to make it work yet. So I’m in that role of me and Eduardo, and trying to find the speakers and the topics that could be in line with the group’s interest. And it has been working. We’ve been doing this for almost four years now. Okay, great. Well, again, this is Sergio Pereira with Chicago Alphanet. Thank you very much for being my first interview. No problem. Take care.