Arthur Kay

Mike again with Ubtastic. I’m here at the Chicago Censure meeting with Arthur Kay. Arthur Kay, he founded the Censure User Group, but thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. What is Censure and why do you have a user group? So, Censure is a tech company that makes a series of JavaScript frameworks as well as some supporting tools to help developers build desktop and mobile applications. And so we started the group because we have a tremendous user community, both here in Chicago and around the world, and I wanted to kind of gather the community here in Chicago since this is where I’m based. Okay, so when you say the JavaScript tools, what are the big ones people would know? So, primarily… Who should know? Primarily people are going to know Censure Touch or our EFTJS products, which are JavaScript libraries for building either mobile or desktop-based web applications. And Raphael, right? Raphael is a sort of side project that we have built up and sort of extended to build the charting packages within both Censure Touch and EFTJS. Okay, so it’s more like… It’s more like a lower-level API. Yes. Okay, yes. But Censure Touch is the big… For building the mobile apps. Yes. Yes, that’s correct. Okay, so you’re supporting the people who are using the frameworks and those tools. Are you a Censure employee or…? Yes, so I work at Vore Censure. My role is on the professional services team as a solutions engineer. Okay. And that kind of boils down to going out to our larger clients to help do product development, to do product trainings, to physically help build applications. Sometimes I speak at conferences and do a variety of other things. So what kind of topics do you do in the future Censure meeting groups? Censure meetings. Yeah, that’s a tough one. Censure. So here at the Chicago User Group, we cover a variety of topics almost always geared towards the Censure tools and Censure frameworks. So this month, right? This month, for example, we are talking about Siesta, which is a unit testing framework. Some months we cover Censure Touch and go in-depth into how to build custom components. Sometimes we cover native packaging. Censure offers some native packaging tools. Sometimes we even cover topics that aren’t directly related to Censure’s frameworks. If there are either outlying JavaScript libraries that might plug into an application or a method or methodology that developers might want to use in their own projects, then sometimes we’ll have a guest speaker come in and present those topics as well. Yeah, because you’re so much of a JavaScript-based system, do you ever work with the local JavaScript groups and have cross-meetings or anything? Once in a while, yeah. There have been a few times where we, or I should say, that I have gone out and spoken at the Chicago JavaScript Meetup. They’ve been kind enough to host us, I think, twice. And I’ve been to a force.com meeting, and I’ve been trying to get some other of these groups to come in and present, like I said, some topics that plug into the ecosystem that Censure developers are going to be somewhat familiar with, so something web or native-based, probably in a JavaScript manner. Okay, so, or anything like a back-to-basics, back-to-fundamentals? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, those kinds of things. So, what’s really, what made you want to start the group, and how long has the group been around? So, the group’s been around for not quite two years now, and back when Censure first hired me, which was the, I think, the winter of 2010, they, or I should say, I had previously been using Censure. So, I had been using Censure’s products, and I was trying to connect with other developers here in Chicago, and I just never really gathered enough steam to get the group off the ground. And once Censure brought me on board, they made it very easy to facilitate that. They would provide some sponsorship of paying for the meetup.com site that we have, and that really allowed me to go out. And find people, get the location that we have to meet every month, and then bring people into the group. Okay, great. And, actually, to kind of answer my next question I was going to ask about the sponsorship, it’s, obviously, Censure is very interested and supportive of, like, about how many people do you usually see? Because it’s, like, I just say, like, when I saw the Censure group, I had to do a little bit of research, even, to find out what Censure is. Like, how do you know, like, how do you go about sharing that there is this group, and also reaching people that might not otherwise know of the toolkits? Sure. So, on a month-to-month basis, the number of people that we have attending varies somewhat. Usually we get between 15 and 40 people every month, and usually people have found the group either through meetup.com. That means that they have been members of other JavaScript groups and noticed that we are here, sort of signed up. Right. Or, on the Censure message boards, I can go out and advertise that we’ve got a group looking for people here in Chicago. Oh, okay. So, there’s a channel through the Censure. There’s a channel there, and then, as I said, Censure really goes out of their way to help support our group, as well as the other groups that are around the country. So, if you have downloaded one of our products, you’re probably on the Censure mailing list. Right. And once every couple of weeks when we send out here the upcoming events that Censure will be at, they will highlight some of the user groups in the areas. So, those are primarily the avenues that people find us. Sometimes it’s just word of mouth, you know, colleagues and coworkers will tag along with people. Okay. So, what is your typical schedule? We typically meet once a month. We meet the last Thursday of every month. Last Thursday. Okay. You know, with this being November, next month being December, that will change a little bit for the holidays. Yeah. But we almost always meet once a month, and it’s almost always on Thursday. Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down. Well, I very much appreciate it. Thank you.