Geekfest w/Dave Hoover

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting here with Dave Hoover from Groupon, on the Optiva. He’s the founder of GeekFest, a user group, kind of an internal group that started at Optiva and has grown, and now it’s migrated over to Groupon. So hi, Dave. Thanks for… Hey, Mike. Hi. Can you tell us a little bit about GeekFest and its origins and kind of where it is today? Sure. We started GeekFest in 2007 at Optiva. It actually didn’t start as anything official. It was just… It was actually an official study group. We were studying Ruby refactoring, a draft of the book that was being worked on at the time. And there was about three apprentices and a kind of part-time contractor, Victoria Wang, at Optiva at that point. And it was just a time for us to sit down and get away from our code a little bit and… You were doing Java most of the time. Actually at that time. Yeah. Because we were all learning Ruby. So I’d been doing Ruby for a number of years, but that was like my first full-time year in Ruby. This was 2000… Actually, I guess it would have been the year before that, but anyway. It started as a study group around this book, but as time went on, it just kind of morphed into more general discussion. And then we’d have people from Optiva who were out at clients come in and give talks. I remember when Andy came and gave a talk on Scala later in 2007. And we got into a habit. We would just all go out and grab sandwiches from Jimmy John’s or something beforehand and then come back and either hack on code a little bit, like fun code, or we’d discuss a book or we would have a presentation. So it sounds kind of like an auspicious beginning to something that’s now a packed house in a mini-conference. I’ve noticed over the years that lots of development shops have, it’s a healthy thing to have a lunch and learn. But like you’re saying, it’s morphed. Yeah. I mean, even the years that I’ve gone, it’s gone from being a few people around a table to a filled room to the room is over-filling, and that’s just when it was still Optiva. Just kind of interesting though, when you started to open up, I mean, I remember coming before I joined Optiva, coming to GeekFest. And it wasn’t quite public. It wasn’t totally– Well, yeah. I mean, so ever since the very beginning, we’ve always been open to outside people, people that weren’t at Optiva and now at Groupon. We’ve always been open to people coming. It’s just we haven’t ever had a huge reason to promote it a lot. We still don’t because we still don’t. We always run out of room very quickly. So yeah, it’s always been available to anybody. About a year after we’ve been– We’ve been doing it, we did a bunch of kind of feedback and surveys for people inside of Optiva and quickly realized that GeekFest had become this very, very important part of what we were. And at that point, we were like, “Okay, well, this has actually become like this kind of perk, benefit sort of thing, and so we should actually start buying lunch. Let’s get out of this habit of people having to run out and grab lunch and come back. Let’s just get lunch ordered.” Yeah. So we started doing that, and that still goes on today. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. Yeah. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. Yeah. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. Yeah. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. Yeah. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. Yeah. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. We’re still doing that. Yeah. Why do you think that, even though it’s so much bigger now, that it’s still … How do you keep in the spirit, is what I’m trying to say. Yeah. I think the spirit of GeekFest has always been a place … The spirit of GeekFest started off as just some people learning some stuff together. But over the years, I think the most consistent theme or spirit has been a fairly safe place to go and practice presentations. Or use this group as a sounding board for ideas or open source projects. I think with the size now, it’s more intimidating. I’ve always wanted it to be a place where a new presenter could come and do their first talk to get some of their jitters out. There’s still people willing to do that as first-time presenters or as young presenters. But it’s certainly more intimidating nowadays with a room of 80 people. Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re getting into the mini-conference now. But I mean, that said, we have an 18-year-old presenting next week on apprenticeship. So I’m happy about that. I’m also happy that people like Chris McAvoy and Adrian … How do you say his last name? Holabadi? Came in the last month and kind of presented either … Well, they presented their projects, their open source projects, whether Open Badges or Django. And Adrian came. I loved Adrian’s talk because it wasn’t fully baked, right? He was saying, “This is something I’m working on. I’m interested in people’s reactions to this.” And that’s the perfect use of GeekFest, is a place to get your ideas out there and engage community interest. Yeah. And that’s one of the histories of GeekFest I remember, is that people weren’t afraid to give their opinion and say, “I don’t know about what you just did.” Yeah. So I think that’s one thing. Now that it’s been about, how long has it been? Eight months, I think, since the acquisition, we need to do a little bit better job of people speaking up more and interrupting and asking questions and giving their opinions. Like we had a pretty good thing going with that about a year ago. Yeah. And I can say, kind of one of my favorite memories was Brian Merrick coming out and doing his hands-on where we pretended to be a computer program. I was a button. I said, “Click.” And we had messaging and things, and it was a lot of fun. And it was a practice for him to go to, I think it was one of the Agile conferences, where he was going to work with business users so they could understand some of the complexities. Right. So that’s like a favorite memory of mine from GeekFest. Do you have any, like, that kind of… Oh, favorite memories? Good question. I mean, Adrian’s talk a week ago was definitely a highlight for me, like there was literally people standing. Yeah. Outside of the room, looking through the glass wall, hoping to pick up what he was talking about. And the fact that like probably 95% of the people in the room were all Rubyists, listening to a guy from the Python community, obviously, was great. I mean, just thinking back, I remember our old friend, Fred Polgardi, just being like a superstar of GeekFest in terms of like being a critical thinker and asking people to think through things and asking tough questions. Yeah. Things like that. So I’d love to see him at a GeekFest again soon. But I’m trying to think, I don’t know, it’s just, I’m just proud that it’s just continued to go. I think a lot of that comes from, well, we have our apprentices organize it, and I think they provide a lot of enthusiasm about the whole thing. Yeah, and that is an interesting thing to bring up, that it’s not just something that you manage or somebody else, it’s something that helps bring the apprentice, apprentices, students together. And I think that gives them an investment in the community. I think that’s kind of, I’m interested that, you know, you have like Ethan who now runs and helps with the Windy City DB. I’m going to be interviewing him next week. Cool. I’m going to ask him about GeekFest and how maybe that might have given him an introduction to community leadership. Sure. Now, yeah, when he was doing it, I don’t know if he was responsible for it back then. I think we might have. He was. Oh, was he? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I think that’s it. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. It all blends together. But actually, like thinking about one, maybe the easiest for me highlight would have been we had three of our past apprentices kind of come and give a talk to future apprentices. Right. Which, actually, I guess Ethan wasn’t there for that. But anyway, that was definitely a highlight to have that kind of full circle sort of talk. Okay. And just so people know that it’s, GeekFest is here at Groupon in Chicago. It’s called GeekFest West. Every Tuesday, you can go to the Gathers Us site to sign up for that or follow GeekFest on Twitter and see what’s coming up. Yep. GeekFest.gathersus. GeekFest.gathersus. I’ll have a link. Cool. All right. Thank you very much, Dave. All right.