JC Grubbs

Hi, I’m Mike again at Chicago WebConf. I’m sitting down with J.C. Grubbs, who’s one of the lead organizers at Chicago WebConf. Thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Chicago WebConf is? Sure. So this is our second year, and it’s basically kind of a conference focused on anything in the front end. So front-end web development. More UX, CUI. Yeah, so it covers everything from user experience and design. We cover all the kind of designing side of things, but also technology. So HTML5 and CSS3 and JavaScript and all kinds of JavaScript libraries. We had a guy this morning talking about porting Node packages to run in the browser. So it’s really about everything that runs in the browser. Okay. So I know you’re a developer. Yeah. So on the front-end and the back-end, you’ve been to conferences that are maybe more R-spec-y, like from the Rails conferences where they’re talking more about back-end. Well, R-spec wouldn’t be just a back-end concept, but how might you compare a more back-end application development kind of conference to what you’re doing here with the UI and front-end? Sure. It’s an interesting mix. The first thing is sort of everyone has to deal with the front-end, right? So whether you’re a Java developer or a Ruby developer, everyone has to deal with the browser. So from an audience perspective, we get a really broad range of people that come from all kinds of different backgrounds. The other interesting thing is that we have both a design and UX component and a technical component, which brings another layer of mix to it. And you have designer types and developer types kind of getting together, which doesn’t happen in a lot of conferences from my experience. So it’s kind of a melting pot. And you have a multi-track event going on here. There’s three tracks? Yep. And do you try to say one track is for designers, one track is for devs? Well, this year we were a little constrained on the space, so we try to keep a good mix of the two. We want people to have options, and if a developer wants to stay in the sort of developer-focused sessions, we try to not overlap them as much as possible. But there’s pretty much a mix of the two going on at any one point in the day. And from our experience last year, a lot of people crossover. So there’s a lot of developers that go to design and UX tracks and vice versa. Yeah, that was going to be my next question, is do you see a lot of cross-pollination? And in the audience, you have this big kind of open area. We’re at 1871, which is a big open area. It’s a big open workspace, so you have a lot of hallway interaction. Have you made any plans with the scheduling? Yeah, so we made sure we have a good 10-minute block between each session. And then there’s an hour for lunch, obviously, so there will be a lot of networking time there. There’s a 30-minute break in the afternoon, which we intentionally wanted to do just to break the day up but also to give people a mingling time. That was something that people asked last year. That was the time that they had to interact with everybody. And then at the end of the day, we have an after party, which is also going to be here from 7 p.m. to whenever people stop drinking. And so yeah, there’s tons of networking time. So content and meeting new friends is the big thing that people go to conferences for as far as I’m concerned. And one thing that I’ve noticed here versus some other conferences, and it has come up in some of the conversations I’ve had with people, is that there is a – looks like to me a better representation of female attendees and minority attendees. Is that something that’s – do you think that was an intentional thing? Did you reach out to different groups or – So it was kind of a happy surprise, honestly. So this year we did pursue some presenters, some female presenters that I had come across throughout the year and I really wanted to have at the conference. But as far as attendees go, we just kind of threw the doors open. And I think with the sort of melting pot effect that I was talking about before, I think that kind of draws all different folks. So yeah, I’ve been really, really happy with the – It’s nice to see. Yeah. It’s nice to see a nice variety of people that’s very representative of a population, not just one rural culture. Yeah. very much for taking the time to speak with me absolutely appreciate it