Interview with Bob Pollin at GOTO Chicago 2015

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here again at GOTO Conf 2015 in Chicago. I’m standing here with Bob Pollin, who is involved with the local Chicago Java user group, CJUG for short, and also DevOps for Kids, which is an event that I got to take my daughter to last week. I had a lot of fun where she did some scratch programming and played with clay. It was a lot of fun, and thank you for taking the time to speak with me. What is DevOps for Kids, and how did you get involved with helping coordinate that? Sure. Yeah, I mean, DevOps for Kids is a program that evolved out of the DevOps conference, which came out of the Belgium jug in Europe. And it was kind of just an add-on to the conference. So kids are basically given the opportunity to play around with technology, some of the same technology that professionals use at work. And the goal of it is to show them all the fun stuff that they can do with technology, where it’s like, hey, I can take Play-Doh and make it light up. I can take Minecraft, and I can change how the behavior works. I can take robots and teach them how to move. So it’s really about inspiring them to pursue technology careers and to see the fun parts of technology. Yeah, and I mean, a lot of classes, schools are starting to teach Java now, but they come into a Minecraft class, and now Java takes on a whole new spectrum where it’s fun. You can do stuff with it. They love Minecraft. I mean, some of the kids are so excited that they can create a new sword. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, the format is really what’s unique about it. So DevOps came out of the DevOps conference. Daniel DeLucia from DevOps is kind of running it right now. Stefan Jensen is the creator of it. And what they have the kids do is so they invite the parents, and they take the approach that the theory is not really the important thing. The important part at that age, at that age, you’re trying to get the kids to see, hey, I can manipulate things in the real world. This is adding value to things I’m already playing with, like Legos, like Play-Doh, like Minecraft. And it gives them a whole new perspective because not only can I now change, you know, how the game is played by playing it, but I can actually change how the internals work. Right. Yeah, because, I mean, a lot of us are now starting to move where computers are commodities. Yep. And they’re… You just buy a computer, it’s a thing, and it does stuff. You don’t really have to understand how it does it, but you give them a little lever that they can start to find a wedge that they can say, like, oh, that does… That is something I can control. And the kids can decide how far down the rabbit hole they actually want to go because it goes pretty deep. Yeah, yeah. So if you scare them away with object-oriented and some of the techniques that you’re taught in college, it kind of disengages them. But if you show them, hey, I can… I can use this to accomplish a goal, it’s like, okay, I’m in Minecraft. I want to face the ender dragon. Well, guess what? You can spawn up your own ender dragon if you change the code, right? Yeah, or if you’re saying, oh, wow, this is kind of… This mod didn’t do what I like. Right. You know, the dragons are blue. They should be purple because they should be purple. Done deal. They can figure it out. They can get in there and realize that that’s a world that they have some ownership and control over. Right. Yeah, so… So just to take a step back to the DevOps, is that a conference series, you said, on its own? Yeah, so DevOps, I mean, it evolved out of the Belgian jug. They’ve got a number of different locations throughout Europe. And the For Kids stuff came over to the U.S. Arun Gupta from Red Hat brought it over. And I learned about it, actually, at Java 1 when his son gave the keynote. Oh, really? Doing Minecraft modding in front of a bunch of professional Java developers. So I was like… Okay, here I have, like, I believe he was 10 years old at the time, doing a keynote for the community. And it’s like, he’s in Eclipse. He’s programming. So it was like, it clicked for me. I’m like, we should be doing this in Chicago. And so it was just a matter of finding a partner, which we found at Loyola, to provide the space, the computers, the labs. Because, surprise, not every six-year-old has a PC. Right, right. So, you know, we had a great partner in providing that. And once we had the venue, everything just kind of accelerated. We had volunteers such as yourself helping out. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, no, I mean, that’s what makes this stuff work. You get a bunch of good tech professionals that are passionate about this and passionate about, you know, teaching kids that, hey, this is actually a fun thing to do with your time. And the kids eat it up. They love it. So are you looking at doing one of these again? Or do you have any thoughts for maybe a future evolution, lessons learned? Oh, yeah. So, I mean, we learned a ton. I mean, none of us are professional educators. So there were… There were certainly things that just in working the conference that we learned that we know we can do better. And it’s just, you know, it’s like anything in software development. You learn by doing it. Yeah. So we’re thinking the big thing that we did is more of an annual thing. So we’re going to be looking to do that again next year. But, you know, if there are places that we can find to do mini sessions on a monthly or bimonthly basis, you know, we’re definitely looking for spots for that where people have things, you know, they have space. And they have labs. And we have people that are passionate about this. Yeah. That can come out and provide the manpower. That can come out and provide the manpower. Or the woman power. Exactly. The people power. Yes. We’ve got a, you know, viewer. I am myself. But, yeah, great. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you for putting on the events. It was a lot of fun. Oh, no, my pleasure. My daughter was talking all about it in her STEM class. And for those of you who don’t maybe have kids or kids are a little bit too young, STEM is now a thing. So stuff like DevVox really dovetails in really nicely. So stuff like DevVox really dovetails in really nicely into their ongoing education as well. Absolutely. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you.