Pittsburgh SC w/Dustin Updyke

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting here with Dustin from the Pittsburgh Software craftsmanship User Group. He’s one of the organizers that helps manage that group. Welcome, Dustin. Can you tell me a little bit about Pittsburgh Software craftsmanship and what you guys do? So a couple of us, you know, came to this last year and really liked the ideals. There was an alternate group in Pittsburgh that we meet pretty regularly, and we liked the format of that and, you know, the diversity in the technologies and things that they used, and it sort of fizzled out. I don’t know why. But then there was really nothing, right? All of the big technologies had their own distinct groups. There was an agile group and some of those things, but there wasn’t one that was sort of open format, you know, bring whatever is sort of ailing you at the time. Right. You know, bring your time to the table and that sort of thing. So nothing that was kind of just about the field of software development. Correct. It was more like Ruby, Java. Is that what you’re saying? Mm-hmm. Okay. And I think a lot of us had day jobs where we were sort of using this stack and we had an interest in something else and we wanted, you know, just a friendly push to keep us on track, right? Right. And the alternate had some of that, but, you know, even they weren’t touching on some of the stuff that we wanted to look at. They were like, “Oh, we need to do this,” or a Mongo or something like that, something that we wanted to experiment in, you know, using for our day jobs, but didn’t have the opportunity to or just didn’t have traction. Okay. And, you know, when we were kind of chatting a little bit before, I said something about, “Oh, you lead the group,” and you’re like, “No, it’s not really that I lead the group. It’s more of…” So it sounded like you had more of a team committee that was helping guide the group. How does that work? Well, it’s a small group. We had started it probably six months ago, and it was your traditional format, right? Meet after work at sort of a central location, and for a lot of us, it just didn’t work because it was, you know, we were some other part of town and it was hard to get there, or it was, you know, I want to go home and see my kids before I go, the format’s not working for me, you know, the location, I want to have a beer, that sort of thing, so, you know, it just sort of went away. And, you know, we were just talking about coming here, and, “Oh, we should get back on track and do that, or try it again,” and, you know, I would say no one leads it, but, you know, people jump in at different times and sort of offer a steer, like, “Oh, we should try this or do that,” and, you know, it’s pretty accepting to try things. It sounds like you have a group of people who have a similar interest, and it’s a little bit of anarchy, controlled anarchy, where we all kind of want to go in a direction, we all, same general direction, but every now and then somebody else takes on the leader hat and helps steer the direction, or… Like, look, finding a location is always sort of difficult, because you, you know, maybe if you want to go and be in a restaurant where you can get something to eat or get something to drink, maybe that’s not the most conducive place to stand up and do a presentation, right? So we sort of struggled with that, and, you know, we all went out and found our own, “What about this? What about that?” and we just sort of voted. And it wasn’t a formal vote, it was just, “Hey, let’s try this. Meet me there at 7 o’clock and let’s see what happens,” and it was like, “Hey, this is working, so let’s do it.” So more Greek democracy than chaos. Okay. And so, like, has there been, like, a kind of a format that’s emerged from that? Is there a tendency towards one type of meeting over another, or are you still experimenting? You know, I guess people have different… Different thoughts on it. We’ve, you know, we’ve gone to meetings where we didn’t even open a laptop and we just talked about concepts, talked about the problems that we were having, right? I moved from a traditional, you know, setup to a totally distributed team, and so I know one meeting we just sat there and talked about my problems and what people thought maybe I could try in order to fix this problem or that. You know, other times, you know, we’ve tried to work through katas and things like that. I think one of the big motivators for me is… I have to do something. It’s not a kata, it’s not an exercise, but I need to do this. So one of the guys on the team, his wife works for a nonprofit in Pittsburgh, they needed some new web technologies. Obviously, they had no budget for it. We said we would do it. And we sort of used GitHub to anchor us on that, assigned tasks and, you know, do check-ins and things like that. So you went beyond just having a group. You actually did something where it was an outreach and created something for the community. You know, we wanted to do Ruby, and that’s sort of how I met you. Yeah. You know, we wanted to use Rails. We wanted to use Redis, and we wanted to do some of these other things, and, you know, they have a free, you know, a whole free set up, but it’s PHP only. So, you know, we thought, well, you know, you never really get to pick a project with no constraints. The customer wants to use PHP, it’s free for life. We should do that for them, right? So we went back and we said, okay, what can we do with that? We can try to do it in a pure TVV style. We can use GitHub, work distributed, come together once a month or, you know, however often we do. We can sort of set the stage for the next sprint and go to it. And it’s worked out. It’s been pretty interesting. It’s worked out pretty well for us. Oh, that’s very interesting. Yeah. So more than just active learning, you’re actively creating something, and you’re kind of learning as a group how to create. That’s very interesting. It’s a style I haven’t heard of. I’ve heard of over the course of the day, people doing presentation style. People doing exercises where you guys are actually learning by creating. So that’s very interesting. Anyway, thank you very much, Dustin, for talking with me about your group. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Appreciate it.