Jonathan Baltz

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here at Chicago Web Conf again, and now I actually have the shirt so I can represent. I’m sitting here with Jonathan Baltz. Jonathan runs the Force.com and the Heroku user groups here in Chicago, and that’s kind of an interesting combination of groups, Salesforce and Heroku. One’s very lean and light, and the other one is a little bit more enterprise-y. Why the two groups? Well, I started organizing the Force.com developer user group in Chicago in around, I believe it was April or May of 2010, and over the time it became one of the largest or the most impactful user groups in the nation. I believe it was the middle of 2011, Salesforce actually purchased Heroku, and I was actually asked to start one of the first Heroku user groups here in Chicago because Salesforce knows how big the technology community is in Chicago, and they wanted to start building up a community and community user groups around America, and they wanted us to be one of the first. Okay. When you say the most impactful, what do you do at a Force.com meeting, like with the enterprise or not too familiar with those, do you present on product, or how to use the product, or? Well, I guess I might have used the word impactful, like involved, I guess. Okay. By involved, meaning we’re continuously having meetings every month, and we continuously post things on Twitter and the Internet. Sometimes a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, there are a lot of user groups, Salesforce is around, but there aren’t that many developer user groups who go in depth into the Force.com platform rather than the administrators and how to use it and how to do the administration stuff. So, and we also have a lot of developer evangelists come talk or, you know, do Google Hangouts with us. So it’s a continuously involved, and by involved, you know, and then so through the involvement we sort of make an impact, and people like look at us. It’s a pattern. Okay. And so like other user groups in other cities are looking at what you’re doing and saying, “Oh, how can we, we can replicate some of what they’re doing in Chicago.” That’s a really interesting position to be in. The two different groups, I have to imagine you get a different audience between Heroku and Salesforce. Yes. Do you get the same people in both, or is it totally different? Well, sometimes you get a few people who do go to both, both meetings. And these are the people who, you know, it’s force.com, it’s Heroku, which is a polyglot platform, meaning you can use different languages on it. And they’re not interested in sort of, you know, only learning what they want to learn. Yeah. They want to learn everything. They want to learn technology. They want to learn how, you know, maybe the way that certain people use some, you know, Java on Heroku, maybe that can, you know, I can use that idea. I can use that concept in my force.com development. And so, so those are the people who go to both. But, you know, between the two of them, with the force.com user group, you find some administrators who want to learn more about development. Two hardcore, invested, other statesmen, if you may, Salesforce developers who, you know, want to either present or hear other people present on the platform. Whereas Heroku, you get a wide variety. It supports Python, Java, Ruby, Node. Scala. And then that’s just the official build pack. Yes, exactly. And so you get a wide variety of people who just, you know, depending on the topic that’s going to be presented, they will either come or not come. Okay. And with the, so would you say that the force.com group is a little bit more pragmatic? What can I do to make my life a little bit better? Whereas maybe the Heroku group seems to be a little bit more, hey, let’s, this is neat. Yeah. 100%. Okay. And, you know, I have to say, I’ve had to touch some Salesforce and I didn’t have nice things to say about it. It was, and that’s not an indictment of this. Do you get people coming to the group? And some of that is probably just not knowing the platform well enough. But do you get some people that come to the meeting and have maybe a chip on their shoulder about Salesforce? Because those, I sometimes, I have mixed feelings about enterprise software. They’re trying to do something good. Trying to create something. But sometimes people get frustrated and we might take our frustrations out on a corporate vendor a little bit harsher than we would an open source vendor. So they get a little bit more of the venom. Yeah. Do you get, ever get? Sometimes. I mean, you don’t get that many. I mean, a lot of times people don’t go to the user group if they don’t want to know about the topic. Yeah. And I think a lot of people that do come are using it or are interested in using it. Or have, like you mentioned, have used it, but want to know more about it. Those people that do have that venomous feeling, they just need to, I mean, a lot of times when that happens, someone will talk to them and then show them the right way to do it. Or suggest that you go to the discussion boards of developerforce.com and ask questions about it. There’s a wide variety on the discussion board, or a wide variety of people on the discussion boards who are willing to help everyone. And that will actually probably give them the answer. And then, you know, the whole idea is like, don’t get frustrated, just ask someone. Yeah. And then, you know, you might, it might make it better. Right. And also, I mean, along the lines of receiving the venom, the sympathy for the developer’s side, I know some Salesforce developers, and those poor, poor souls with, because they have to take on all the responsibility because a lot of other people aren’t as either, as well, either lack of interest or just don’t know it as well, tend to try to push as much responsibility on them as possible. Is there, is there some sense of relief maybe coming into a force.com group? It’s like, ah, we’re, we’re the blood brothers. We’ve, we’ve done battle together. Is, is, is there maybe a little bit more identification with, with force.com developers? There is in, I mean, there is somewhat, but it, that’s not what we’re looking for. I mean, it’s not really a close knit group of like, okay, now, you know. I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know. But soldiers or policemen or firemen or people who have, you’ve been in, you know, you’ve been in things together. You, you, you, like, you’re, you have this camaraderie, this, this, you know, sympathy or empathy. It’s actually just like, I want to learn more. I want to see how things are, you know, who are. Just a positive answer. Yeah. And then, you know, you mentioned that regarding, you know, that people would just push tasks or issues onto the Salesforce team. I mean, I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. 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