Developer Community And Conference Conversations: Mike Hall Interviews David Dickinson

Sure, so I'll start with a little bit of history. We used to have a dinette user group that was dying and we decided that we needed to make a language agnostic, technology agnostic and we had a couple people going up to Chicago to their Software Craftsmanship user group and we liked what we saw and we connected with some of the people there to get ideas and assistance and we just started the group in South Bend and we meet once every two months and a typical meeting is a speaker talks for a little while and then we just have open discussion afterwards with the speaker. If I had to give advice for for the smaller cities like South Bend, reach out to the Software Craftsmanship community in a big city near you because Chicago has been instrumental in helping us. They've been sending out speakers like Uncle Bob and people from Teva Groupon and A-Flights interested in helping us out as well. So definitely look for help. There's plenty of people in the community that are willing to help. Yeah so like you said you go on a kind of a semi-monthly cycle. Why don't you guys go semi-monthly versus doing a monthly schedule that seems to be kind of a common pattern? I think part of it is like Russ mentioned, we were talking earlier just for the workload.

But I think that our goal would be to do it more often and we're moving towards having weekly meetings to begin moving to the Ruby world and I imagine there are a lot of people in the community that are willing to help.

I think part of it is like Russ mentioned, we were talking earlier just for the workload but I think that our goal would be to do it more often and we're moving towards having weekly meetings to begin moving to the Ruby world and I imagine there are a lot of people in the community that are willing to help. we do at least once a month with the whole team to do one of these speakers or something like that. So I'm curious, like you explicitly said Ruby, what is it about, why do you gravitate towards Ruby versus just any other? So our talent is primarily . NET, so it's just introducing diversity and a different school of thought and Ruby has kind of a community mindset anyways and so just to bring, find those who do know Ruby that we're not connecting with, bring those into into our group would also increase our sense of community as well. I think if the Microsoft guys are used to having a Microsoft-ish kind of community and we'd be able to move, it's harder to find the same sort of thing with PHP or Python, they're not as close-knit. We want to move out of a compiled language, I did anyway, move the team out of a compiled language into a dynamic language and just see what would happen there and Ruby's, you move into another place where there's already a home, there's a house they're built. Oh yeah, so it's, you have kind of a preconceived notion of the community that comes from kind of an established Microsoft developer base and you're looking at well where else could we go from that and looking at the Ruby community which has been really active, what are you saying that seems to be kind of appealing, like an easier transition because you kind of have an idea of where you're going to not kind of... Yeah, I'd like to stress that the Software Craftsmanship group is technology agnostic, we still have speaking, our speakers talk about either soft skills or higher level themes, so but we also need to have the people get used to getting together and pair program and stuff like that and so we're using Ruby since it's a new language as an avenue to do that, so we're going to teach people Ruby, get them together and do contests together, learn how to do TDD and stuff like that, so it's, that's... This is the focus we're taking. And you know, we did have a little brief conversation before and we talked about how, you know, South Bend, you're kind of a, it's more of a residential community where people are commuting to and from South Bend, so you have a little bit of a challenge dealing with trying to get people in in the evenings or in the early mornings, you know, like what is your attendance of like when you're trying to do an evening meeting, does it usually seem to be overly impacted by the fact that people are commuting to South Bend versus working right there? Sure, since we meet once every two months, our meeting attendance is usually 30 or so, which isn't bad, but for the more collaborative building type meetings that we have, like a Coke and Coffee, which Coke and Coffee is usually in the morning, which we have trouble getting people to come out, so for this Ruby exercise, we're gonna partake in here, we're gonna do it during lunch.

So we'll just meet at a kind of a common place consistently once a week, and we think we'll get a lot better attendance at lunchtime. Yeah, yeah, lunches, having a family myself, I can attest to those midday breaks are a little bit easier to accommodate the schedule, yeah. Okay, well, you guys have a website, we'll be posting that along with the LinkedIn, well, what is the website? Actually, we have a LinkedIn group.

Yeah, but we are evaluating different methods.

Yes. Okay, great. All right, well, thank you very much, Ross and David, appreciate you sitting down with me. Thank you. Take care.