Joel Clermont

Hi, it’s Mike here with Ugetastic and I’m sitting down, well not really sitting down, we’re on a Skype call, but I’m talking with Joel Claremont who runs the Milwaukee PHP Users Group. Hi Joel, thanks for taking the time to chat today. Hello. So you run the Milwaukee PHP Users Group. How long has that group been around? What do you guys do with the PHP group? So the group was formed in December 2009 and actually I was not the person who formed it. So it was, I had a note on Meetup expressing an interest in PHP groups in my area, but for whatever reason I never took the initiative to start the group. So anyways, I was on vacation in Florida, it was December 2009, somebody started the group, Aaron Saray, and like within five minutes of me getting that email, I joined. And so we kind of started it. I have to give him credit for actually plunking down the money in Meetup and getting it started. So our first Meetup was in January because I was down in December, down in Florida for the whole month. I think we had like six or seven people at our first Meetup and we were a bit ambitious in trying to do it twice a month. So we were going to meet on the second and fourth Tuesday. I think we did that through summer and in summer it really got difficult because, you know, it’s Wisconsin, we actually had some sunshine to get people to give us some additional free time. It was tough. But we’ve been going strong at least once a month and the second Tuesday of the month is when we’ve been meeting for the last couple of years. Okay. And what was it that made you want to do it twice a month? Was there a particular reason for that? Naivety? I don’t know. It was something we were both interested in doing. I think… Well, once a week seemed way too much and I guess in our initial estimation, once a month seemed like maybe not enough. Part of it, too, was maybe somebody couldn’t make it to one Meetup, but they could make it to the other. So at least most people could make it to at least one a month. But, you know, finding speakers, a venue wasn’t a problem. We have a pretty stable location that we can meet at whenever we need. But finding speakers, topics, getting people excited about it just twice a month was a bit too much. But once a month seems to be a really nice fit. Yeah, it’s kind of a common pattern to have that once a month. You can just kind of plan for it where if it’s twice a month, it’s… I’d have to, like what you said with the speakers, you’d have two different contents and… Well, and to make it even crazier, our initial format was we had two presentations per meeting. So our thought was we’d try to have like a kind of a, either a beginner’s or maybe more business-oriented one. Soft skills for the first half. And the second half, we’d have a little more in-depth, a little more hands-on. And now our format has been just one presentation with a little more focus on group interaction. People hang out more afterwards and exchange ideas, help each other with problems. So early on, it was four a month. That was really tough to do. Yeah, so now it’s more tech and then social. Okay. And what kind of… When you were doing… When you were doing the soft skills, that was kind of interesting. Most… I haven’t heard that very often from many groups. Was that something that was well-received or you said you kind of stopped doing that? Was it just for lack of speakers? No, we still have some talks that are not super technical. You know, we’ve had talks on more business side of things like how to find clients, freelancing. We even have something, you know, because PHP is a web development language. Primarily, we’ll have stuff on maybe JavaScript frameworks or, you know, it runs the full spectrum. It’s not all, you know, this is purely PHP code and that’s it that we talk about. Right. And so, like, do you have a pretty vibrant community? How many people do you get per month? So there, I just pulled it up on meetup. We are at 262 members right now. That’s pretty good. Sounds like a lot. Average meetup, I would say, is probably at 15 to 20. Okay. And I think on our high end, maybe 35. So in the three years we’ve been running, once a year, we’ve been able to bring in somebody kind of from outside of the region. So our first year, we had somebody from Zend, who’s one of the big corporate entities in the PHP world. He flew up from Texas. He gave a nice talk. Last year, we had Keith Casey, who was representing Twilio, which, you know, they do a lot with the community. And so he came up, and I think he’s out of Texas, too. And then this year, we had somebody from Orchestra, or Engineered is who bought Orchestra. They had somebody come out and speak to us just two months ago. So those tend to draw more people. Are you getting sponsors that bring them in, or were they in town for a conference and they came and talked? Kind of. Well, in all three cases, their corporate entity sponsored them. So Zend sponsored Kevin when he came, Twilio sponsored Keith, and Engineered sponsored Liz when she came. So that’s worked out great. As a small user group, we could not afford to fly people in and put them up for the night. So that’s been great. Plus, they usually come with goodies like giveaways and raffles and things like that, too. So that’s part of what the appeal is. Engineered even bought us pizza and food. So that also brings people to the meetings and little things like that. Because we typically have our meetings at 6 p.m., so people are just getting off of work, maybe haven’t eaten yet. So knowing that there’s pizza or something there makes it a little bit more likely that they’ll want to show up. Before we were talking on the interview, you kind of mentioned that you’re starting to dabble in some other platforms and languages and are going to those user groups and conferences. Just curious, what is it that you’re looking into and which communities are you starting to go to? What has been your experience? Okay. So in August, I had a little bit more free time. I sold my consulting company. And one of the things that I always wanted to dig deeper into was Ruby. And I’m familiar with the language. I even maintained a small open source project in Ruby for a few years, but never really used it as part of my… My work as part of my day-to-day job. So I decided to get started. We have a Milwaukee Ruby group here right in town. It meets once a month as well. So I’ve been going to that. In August, we also had Madison Ruby, which was the first Ruby-focused conference I’ve been at. And it was just fantastic. So I highly recommend going to that. I’ll be there again next year. And even… It was last month. I presented at the Milwaukee Ruby group on RubyMotion, which is a tool chain for building iOS apps in Ruby. So I’ve been enjoying it. I’m still not really using it for my day-to-day work. I have an iOS project I’m working on right now with RubyMotion, but I haven’t even gotten into Rails yet or anything like that. So still early days, but I find the community to be pretty welcoming. Nobody has booed me yet for saying I’m a PHP developer. So it’s been pretty friendly. That’s good. That’s good. Overall, as far as the content or the approach, has there been any kind of difference that you’ve seen between a PHP-focused group or community versus going to the Ruby community? Yeah. I guess one thing I’ve noticed that’s real popular in the Ruby community is the notion of pairing, of being able to just tap somebody’s shoulder and say, Hey, can we pair for half? And maybe you don’t even know that person. I did that at Ruby Madison just to kind of try it out, get outside of my comfort zone a little bit, and I was amazed. I also did a little bit of Ruby interaction at a code retreat, and that was really my first experience doing a full day of pair programming, and I loved it. And actually, that’s something I’d like to see kind of grow in other communities, too. I think the PHP community could benefit. Other communities could benefit from that as well. Yeah, it’s fun. But those code retreats are intense. That’s not a normal pairing experience. I shouldn’t say that. Well, anyway, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down and chat. Yeah, you’re welcome.