ChiPy w/Brian Ray

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting here with Brian Ray from the Chippy, the Chicago Python Users Group. Hi Brian, thanks for sitting down. We’re about to go into a meeting, but I thought we’d sit down and talk about the group beforehand. So Brian, can you tell me a little bit about Chippy and the Chicago Python community? Well, since 2003, I call myself a founding member along with Ian Viging and Chris McAvoy and a group of others that showed up at Goose Island. Literally, I could fit around this table talking about a language at the time that wasn’t as popular as it is now. It’s called Python, which has become a very popular language in recent years. Yeah, with Google’s really embracing it. Google’s embraced it. A lot of other companies and businesses have embraced it. At the time when we started meeting, one of our largest draws was from the scientific community, in fact. So a lot of scientists from the universities here and even professors doing research would show up to our meetings. Isn’t Python one of the few languages that’s interstellar? I thought one of the rovers had some scripting in Python. It does. In fact, one of our very active members, David Beasley, who also teaches a specialized class here in Chicago and also presents at Chippy quite frequently, did go down to NASA and taught Python to a lot of the engineers there recently. That’s kind of intimidating. He’s quite a smart guy. In fact, we record a lot of our meetings, and the one meeting he spoke about, the GIL, which is an element of Python, an internal, had 41,000 downloads or something like that in a short period of time. So Chippy does a lot more than just have a monthly meeting, which we do have, obviously. Yeah, I was going to say, as we kind of were talking before the interview, I had noticed meetings looked like they had gone back to 2004, but really you said 2003, and that was the first recorded meeting. Yeah, right. So our very early meetings consisted of us meeting up in various locations, clearly like the Mononock building, the famous building in Chicago. And we kind of got into the trend of moving our meetings around a lot. And that’s worked well with Chicago because there’s a lot of different places that use Python for very different things. So meeting in a university would be totally acceptable. We’ve met in Chicago Tribune, like last year alone, we’ve met in Chicago Tribune Towers for a meeting that drew over 150 people. We’ve met at Morningstar, which had a good draw last year. You know, even at Google’s Chicago office, we’ve had some very successful meetings this last year. Now, most places, when they move to different locations, it can be kind of hard to track people. I mean, it sounds like you have a following that’s going to go wherever you’re at. Yeah, we’re the Grateful Dead of user groups, for sure. We’ve got a lot of following, and then people that can’t make it because it’s in one location or another. Generally, we want to be somewhere where people can get to it via public transportation as well as traditional transportation. We want to be as centralized as possible and accessible. Another big challenge now is finding a space big enough to fit 70, 80, 100, 150 people for some meetings. Yeah, and it’s funny because until I joined Groupon and Ken Stocks had sent out Stocks, right? Yes. Had sent out the blast to the internal dev mailing list. I didn’t even know there was a – well, I should say, that’s not correct. I knew of a group a while ago, Cosmin had mentioned it a few years ago, the Chicago Code Camp, but I didn’t realize it was so active. You have your own website, and you kind of manage your group outside of the popular mainstream meetup and Eventbrite. Right, right. So we directed a lot of those ideas early on, and I think that was really out of resistance of becoming the shiny new thing, because a lot of times the shiny new thing we found when we were watching other groups is they’re gone before you know it. And so that’s really been a point of resilience for us is to not be the shiny new thing. Right. And despite all of our efforts to be unsuccessful, here we are again, and we are. Yes. So, you know – Well, it sounds like you have a little bit of success with 80-plus people, 50. 50-some-odd for this meeting. Sure. Yeah, we do. And, you know, there’s a lot of new members that are coming this time. Probably presents I grew up on, for instance. But there’s also a lot of well-seasoned members. There’s a lot of professors and scientists coming, as well as very well-known web developers and mobile developers as well. I did not realize that there was such a vibrant Python community here in Chicago. Yeah, there is. That’s – you know, because, I mean, the Ruby is very good at being the shiny new thing. Yeah. So I just wonder how much – do you have – do you feel any competition or is it cross-pollination with – like, you have two dynamic languages, two scripting languages that are both kind of answering the same domain of problems, or at least from my perspective, do you get much cross-pollination with the groups? Yes. So, you know, very early on, Ruby days, you know, we already had an establishment. And there was a lot of recruitment from the Ruby community coming into our – into our music group. And I don’t know if the same is true of the opposite direction, but certainly that was true. You know, we had Snakes and Rubies at a one-time conference where we put DHH, the writer of Ruby on Rails, who came to Chicago for 37 Signals, and we had Adrian Hlavardy, who came – who was a Chicago guy as well, who wrote Django and Python from two different worlds. And we put them in front of each other at DePaul University and expected a couple people to show up to see them. And then we filled the entire place with over 120 people. Yeah. I think I heard about that. That was kind of a – I didn’t realize that was Chicago. Yeah. It was kind of a famous thing, but that was actually sponsored by Chimpy, that event was. And as a lot of other events, like I said, we have a mentorship program. You know, we have other events, like we sent three guys to PyCon this year, a couple weeks ago. That was paid completely out of Chimpy funds. All of our meetings are completely paid out of Chimpy funds. So, you know, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s always food and drink there. Well, if they’re free, how did you get the funds for your sponsorships? So, yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And lately, one thing we’ve been doing is doing some of our – doing some recruiting connections. So some organizations are looking for high-notch sponsorships. So, yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun. Yeah. So we get sponsorships from various organizations. And, you know, it’s kind of a lot of fun.