Building Corporate Communities: Arthur Kay on Sencha, Ext JS, and Local Meetups
Building Corporate Communities: Arthur Kay on Sencha, Ext JS, and Local Meetups
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
The Guest
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Mike again with UGtastic. I'm here at the Chicago Sencha meeting with Arthur Kay. Arthur Kay, he founded the Sencha User Group, but thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. What is Sencha and why do you have a user group?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
So, Sencha 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Okay, so when you say the JavaScript tools, what are the big ones people would know?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Primarily people are going to know Sencha Touch or our Ext JS products, which are JavaScript libraries for building either mobile or desktop-based web applications.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
And Raphael, right?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Raphael is a sort of side project that we have built up and sort of extended to build the charting packages within both Sencha Touch and Ext JS.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Okay, so it's more like a lower-level API.
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Yes.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
But Sencha Touch is the big one for building the mobile apps.
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Yes, that's correct.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Okay, so you're supporting the people who are using the frameworks and those tools. Are you a Sencha employee?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Yes, so I work at Sencha. My role is on the professional services team as a solutions engineer. 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
So what kind of topics do you do in the Sencha meeting groups?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
So here at the Chicago User Group, we cover a variety of topics almost always geared towards the Sencha tools and Sencha frameworks. This month, for example, we are talking about Siesta, which is a unit testing framework. Some months we cover Sencha Touch and go in-depth into how to build custom components. Sometimes we cover native packaging. Sencha offers some native packaging tools. Sometimes we even cover topics that aren't directly related to Sencha's frameworks. If there are either outlying JavaScript libraries that might plug into an application or a 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.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Because you're so much of a JavaScript-based system, do you ever work with the local JavaScript groups and have cross-meetings?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Once in a while, yeah. There have been a few times where 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 some topics that plug into the ecosystem that Sencha developers are going to be somewhat familiar with, so something web or native-based, probably in a JavaScript manner.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
What made you want to start the group, and how long has the group been around?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
So, the group's been around for not quite two years now. Back when Sencha first hired me in the winter of 2010, I had previously been using Sencha'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. Once Sencha brought me on board, they made it very easy to facilitate that. They would provide some sponsorship by 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 meet at every month, and bring people into the group.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Obviously, Sencha is very supportive. About how many people do you usually see? How do you go about sharing that there is this group, and reaching people that might not otherwise know of the toolkits?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
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. Usually people have found the group either through meetup.com—meaning they have been members of other JavaScript groups and noticed that we are here—or on the Sencha message boards, where I can go out and advertise that we've got a group looking for people here in Chicago.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
So, there's a channel through Sencha.
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
There's a channel there, and Sencha really goes out of their way to help support our group, as well as the other groups around the country. If you have downloaded one of our products, you're probably on the Sencha mailing list. Once every couple of weeks when we send out upcoming events, they will highlight some of the user groups in the areas. Those are primarily the avenues that people find us. Sometimes it's just word of mouth, colleagues and coworkers tagging along.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
What is your typical schedule?
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
We typically meet once a month. We meet the last Thursday of every month. With this being November, next month being December, that will change a little bit for the holidays. But we almost always meet once a month, and it's almost always on Thursday.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down. I very much appreciate it.
Arthur Kay
Sencha Solutions Engineer, Organizer of Chicago Sencha User Group
Thank you.
Critical Insights
durable
"Corporate sponsorship of local user groups (e.g., covering Meetup.com fees) is a highly effective, low-cost strategy for technology companies to bootstrap grass-roots developer evangelism."
durable
"Specialized framework user groups (like Sencha) benefit from cross-pollinating with broader ecosystem communities (like general JavaScript or Force.com groups) to expose their tooling to adjacent developer networks."
time bound
"Ext JS and Sencha Touch represented a significant era of 'heavy' JavaScript application frameworks focused on enterprise UI components before the dominance of modern component architectures like React."