Matt Polito

Hi, I’m Mike with U-Tastic. I’m here at SCNA again. I’m sitting there with Matt Polito. Matt was kind of a fixture in the Ruby community here in Chicago for several years through Tiva, and he worked with the Chicago Ruby and Whitney City Rails Conference. But he loved the cold northern climes to go down to Jacksonville, Florida and join Hash Rocket. So you went down and you had a pretty good body of experience dealing with user groups here in Chicago and conferences in Jacksonville. Was it different going down to Jacksonville, or what did you experience? It was. The area or the pool of developers is different, mainly because it’s not as dense of an area as the Chicago and surrounding areas. So the Ruby group that was in place already had a dwindling headcount. It was tough to get people to come in. Dwindling? Sorry, dwindling from? From just, you know, every meeting seemed to get a little small. Were you starting in the 50s? Oh, no, this is maybe 8 or 12, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. When we would have it in the city proper in Jacksonville, you would see a spike. So you could tell that more dark area, more likely people will come, which was the exact same case in Chicago as well. We had the Elmhurst meetings, which had a decent turnout, but when we merged with the other group and took it over to Chicago, it exponentially grew. Right. It blew up. Yeah. So you’re not in Jacksonville. You’re dealing with a group that’s already having trouble pulling in people. What was? So I actually wasn’t a part of that group. Okay. Just been around the people who run it. Right. And then my experience here, they decided to shut it down. It wasn’t worth putting the effort and time into it because people weren’t attending. Right. So that ended several months ago. And then just recently, one of our developers at Ash Project decided to take it upon himself to reinvigorate the community with these types of meetings. And that just started last night, actually. That seemed to be a pretty good turnout. So I’m excited that we may have someone who’s interested in bringing that community back because I am interested in participating here as well. So was there anything that, I mean, you mentioned the density and having a city meeting versus a suburban meeting. I’m assuming that the one meeting was a suburban. Similar. It’s not quite a suburb, but Jacksonville is an interesting area. I learned it’s the largest continental land mass. So even though you think it’s just Jacksonville, it’s not. Jacksonville. It’s huge. Yeah. And there’s a lot of little pieces. We are at the beach, which is a considerable distance from the actual city. It can take 40 or so minutes. Oh, okay. So it’s very similar to having a Chicago meeting and an Elmhurst meeting, which we found here that the people that went to those meetings would not go together. So you’re looking at trying to figure out how to get people interested in the meetings again. Were there any lessons you took from the demise of the previous group and are going to try to do differently in the new group? We did things very similar to, or they were done very similar to how we did them in Chicago, being, you know, always have a specific time every month. So it becomes ingrained, “Oh, today is our meeting night.” Right, right. Always having the same location, which is something we didn’t tweak. Right. Because maybe the location is the thing that’s going down. The consistency of schedule, consistency of location. I know that I will be near here on the states. Exactly. I think that was really the big successful thing we learned with each other, really, was consistency. Because that consistency wasn’t the thing that was happening with a lot of the other groups. And a lot of the smaller groups died. Also catering to beginners. Okay. Tends to get more people in. It’s a broader audience. Yeah. We’ve had an interesting conversation about that in Jacksonville, that the people who start a user group want to do it to be around like-minded people. Right. But, and you say you’re starting. And you have beginner to intermediate talks. And then you kind of get to this place where you no longer want to have those talks. You want advanced stuff. But the things that are still happening are not advanced. So then you start to stop going. And then I think that that’s the point where headcount starts to dwindle, when people start mulling out or no longer have an interest in the types of talks. So it definitely is a balance. Because you need to have the beginner-level talks to get new fresh blood. But also find a way to keep the people that are there interested. So you have that sustained. I’ve heard some of encouraging the more senior attendees to be more active. They come in, they learn, and then they can start to teach. Yeah. That would be ideal. Yeah. I think that that doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t happen a lot here, as well, either. Well, unless it’s . Yeah. Where you get to a certain level where you start a bigger job and you know who I’m looking at. . No, you stop going. So, yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. Sure. Thank you. Thank you.