The Community Pastiche
A living, extensible timeline of the individuals, user groups, zero-dollar conferences, and hallway conversations that built the Chicago software craftsmanship renaissance. Beyond the celebrity keynote circuit, this preserves the essential contributions of the practitioners who made the rooms possible.
Sergio Pereira, Chicago Alt.NET & The SCNA Context
"The first user group I ever went to was Chicago Alt.NET. And the first user group I ever spoke at was Chicago Alt.NET. That's why I wanted to interview you first." — Mike Hall to Sergio Pereira at SCNA 2011.
Meeting on the 2nd Wednesday of each month on the 50th floor of the Sears Tower at Redpoint Technologies, Sergio Pereira created the template for cross-platform peer learning in Chicago. By bringing TDD, BDD, and open-source practices to an enterprise .NET town, Alt.NET laid the groundwork for everything that followed: BDI, 8th Light's Pair Friday, SCNA, CDG, and SCMC.
TicketsNow: WatiN, WatiR & Real-Time Distributed Inventory
While leading the Real-Time Inventory Locking service at TicketsNow to prevent concurrency race conditions across EventInventory broker clients, Mike needed browser automation tools. Evaluating WatiN (Web Application Testing in .NET) led directly to its parent Ruby project, WatiR. It was the first spark showing that developer tooling outside the Redmond ecosystem offered radically faster feedback loops.
Chicago Alt.NET: The First Room and First Stage
Chicago Alt.NET was the very first technical user group Mike ever attended, and the first stage where he ever spoke. Meeting on the second Wednesday of every month at Redpoint Technologies in the Sears Tower, Sergio Pereira created a safe harbor for .NET developers who refused to accept that Microsoft was the only authority on software quality. It became the blueprint for everything Mike built later.
Ray Hightower: The Ambassador & The Restaurant Seam
While operating as remote Principal Developer at Business Decisions, Inc. (BDI), managing a multi-tenant 360 HR system and coordinating engineers in Uruguay, Mike met Ray Hightower at a restaurant between their locations. Ray was the first true community ambassador: he didn't just mention Ruby; he opened his laptop, demonstrated Cucumber, and told Mike about open gatherings happening at 8th Light up in Lake County.
8th Light's 'Pair Friday': Terminal Workbench & Carl Sagan
Walking into 8th Light’s small Libertyville office for Pair Friday was stepping into another technical dimension for a Microsoft-focused developer. Macs sat on desks, RSpec and Vim ran in the terminal, tmux was revealed, and MelodySheep's Carl Sagan remixes played in the background. It proved that engineering was not a corporate compliance activity, but an apprenticeship-based craft.
Signing the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship as #106
On Friday, March 6, 2009, at 7:06:59 PM CST (UTC 2009-03-07T01:06:59Z), Mike Hall registered on the newly launched public ledger of manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org as Signatory #106 ('Michael D. Hall, Crystal Lake, IL'). Drafters #1–#6 (Bradbury, Haines, Pagel, M. Martin, Uncle Bob, Chelimsky) had just published the site.
SCNA 2009, Dave Hoover & The Obtiva Apprenticeship
When traditional corporate conferences rejected hands-on refactoring talks for being 'too practical,' 8th Light and Obtiva teamed up to launch Software Craftsmanship North America (SCNA 2009). At the conference, an esteemed local recruiter introduced Mike to Dave Hoover. Mike joined Obtiva in August 2009, diving into Geekfest study groups and consulting engagements at Leapfrog Online, Sears, and Groupon.
The SCNA Table Meeting: Mike Hall & Ryan Gerry Launch CDG
At SCNA 2009, Mike walked up to a table and introduced himself to Ryan Gerry: 'Hi, I'm Mike. Where are you from?' They discovered they lived 15 minutes apart in far northwest McHenry County—an area 50 miles outside Chicago with zero technical user groups. They decided right then to build one, launching CDG (Cloud Developers Group). Without corporate backing, they met in public library meeting rooms, Panera Bread backrooms, and upstairs at Duke's Alehouse in Crystal Lake.
Founding SCMC: Jim Suchy & Follett Software Company
After 18 months of CDG, cloud computing ran its course and the group pivoted to deliberate coding practice, rebranding as Software Craftsmanship McHenry County (SCMC). Bringing in Jim Suchy from 8th Light provided deep kata curriculum. Ryan Gerry secured a permanent home at Follett Software Company in McHenry. 8th Light, Follett, and Groupon sponsored food, and moving the group to Meetup.com triggered a 50% attendance explosion.
Chicago Code Camp: The 500-Person Zero-Dollar Conference
Between 2010 and 2012, Chicago Code Camp gathered over 500 software engineers on Saturday mornings for six concurrent tracks on everything from Ruby and JVM to mobile and testing. As co-organizer and web lead, Mike designed the event websites and built a custom Anonymized Blind Review Engine so speakers were selected purely on merit, not celebrity clout.
UGtastic at SCNA 2011: Interviewing Watir Maintainer Charley Baker
Six years after first discovering WatiR while evaluating WatiN at TicketsNow, Mike sat down with Charley Baker at SCNA 2011 with the UGtastic camera. Baker discussed maintaining the open-source Watir testing framework, unifying fractured Java, .NET, and Ruby groups in Colorado, and proving that community building was the real engine of technical talent.
Coderwall & Developer Identity: Reconnecting with Matt Deiters
Reconnecting years after their initial paths crossed at TicketsNow, Mike collaborated with Matt Deiters around Coderwall. The platform captured the cultural zeitgeist of the era: laptop stickers and git achievements as verifiable markers of a developer's real-world craftsmanship and open-source contributions.
UGl.st: The Open User-Group Directory Before Centralized Silos
Seeing how proprietary platform algorithms, paywalls, and spam were threatening independent community discoverability, Mike built UGl.st (The User-Group List). Designed as a lightweight, open static directory, it emphasized verified location data, cadence, and direct organizer contacts rather than engagement metrics.
The 17-Year Continuous Room: Ryan Gerry's SCMC Stewardship
While hundreds of user groups flickered out or were absorbed by corporate marketing machines, SCMC persisted continuously for over 17 years. Meeting monthly at Follett Software Company, the group maintained an open, vendor-neutral table for polyglot katas, architecture retrospectives, and practitioner keynotes.
Phalanx Duel & The Rewatch: Carrying Craftsmanship into the Age of AI
In September 2026, Mike returned to the SCMC presentation stage to deliver 'Phalanx Duel: Make the Rules Legible,' demonstrating deterministic state engines and rule verification in the AI era. In October 2026, the retrospective series launches with a comprehensive rewatch of the first UGtastic interview with Sergio Pereira—synthesizing 20 years of lived community lessons to ensure the unsung contributions of Midwest software craftsmanship are never forgotten.