DC Alt.NET w/Max Lancaster

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here sitting with Max from the Washington, D.C. AltaNet Group. Hi, Max. How’s it going? Good, how are you doing? I’m good. We’re going to sit down here to talk about the AltaNet Group. Can you tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing in D.C.? Yeah, basically we’re a fairly small group. We’ve had a couple of real big meetings, but it depends on the speaker. Usually our format is that we bring in an outside speaker who does a presentation, and then we kind of hang out. We always have pizza, of course. So we vary in size, but we have a pretty core group of a small group of people who attend pretty regularly. When you say small size, what do you mean? I’d probably say about 10 to 15 who are pretty regular, I would say. And then we’ve had probably up to 50, 40 to 50 at different times. What kind of people do you have? What kind of topic brought out the good guy? It was the JavaScript. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but his tiki, wiki, what is his name? Voodoo Tiki Guy. Voodoo Tiki Guy. Yeah, Voodoo Tiki Guy. He’s a JSConf guy. I can’t remember his actual name, but I remember his Twitter handle is very memorable. I looked that one up, but that means something in there. Yeah. So we’ve had speakers on JavaScript Enclosure, Mercurial, Fitness. Interestingly, being a .NET group, most of our presentations haven’t been about .NET. They’ve been about things peripheral to .NET or just new technologies. And that’s been great, and it’s good to learn things outside the .NET space. And when you’re saying that you bring in speakers that are talking about a variety of topics, it sounds like you’re not even able to go to the Microsoft pool of speakers. You’ve kind of got to go to other communities. Yeah. Or are you picking up on other .NET developers who are also… dabbling in these things, or maybe using them? How do you guys go about reaching out to the company for that? Mostly, we have a very solid founder of our group, Matt Pogosaki. And he is very active in different communities, and he has a lot of contacts. He’s mainly been the one so far to bring in speakers, and we’re kind of working on getting more, kind of becoming more self-directed. And becoming a real community. But since we have such strong leadership, he’s kind of been the one bringing in the people. We have on a few occasions, particularly our Mercurial, one of our kind of solid members, did our Mercurial presentation, did a bang-up job on that one. But basically, we kind of have strong leadership, so that’s kind of how we’ve made all the contacts. And we’ve had some really high-quality speakers because of that. But I think we’d like to probably branch out into more open space, or lightning talk type format so that we have more kind of self-organizing. Organizing from within instead of top-down. You’re bringing in, you’re looking at trying to get more people from what would typically be audience members. Yeah, exactly. Right. I think we’d like to have more kind of participation in the selection of the topics, and in the presentations as well, instead of just bringing in outside people all the time. I think we’d kind of like to be more of a meet-up style, you know, at different times. We haven’t really experimented with that too much so far. But things are working out. But we definitely have some solid members who’ve kind of presented on different topics. Like Ruby on Rails, we had somebody from within the group, one of the founders of the group, came in and did a talk on Ruby on Rails as well. Cool. And do you go with, are you kind of on a monthly cycle? Yeah, usually monthly. We’ve been kind of on a break right now. But for a solid couple of years, we were going strong here. We were going strong every month. And I felt like that was important. I mean, it was really, you know, Matt was one who I kind of talked to when I got involved, who was kind of running the group. And it just kind of worked out that way. But I felt like it was important to be committed to having the group meet every month. So I made sure that I did everything I could to kind of provide the space in my office. And honestly, part of the reason that I got involved was just so I didn’t have to spend an hour in DC traffic to get there. So I just, you know, offered up the office space at my company. We have a really nice space. Yeah, that was, you actually, you just led right, you just stepped right on my next question. I was going to ask, where do you typically meet? So where did they meet before you offered the space? I think they’ve moved around. We did have a pub night a while ago, but mostly at Motley Fool, which is the company I work for. We’ve been meeting in our offices now pretty consistently for a couple of years. And interestingly, I’ve been… making every effort to get more people from within my own company involved because I think it’s good for the environment and, you know, for people to be exposed to these different technologies. So I’ve had a few people from my office come in and help facilitate as much as I put, you know, especially when I couldn’t be there. So that’s, you know, it’s varying degrees of success on that one. But I just feel like it’s good, you know, I like being involved in the community. It’s convenient for me because, you know, it’s just right there. All I have to do is kind of provide a space. You know, coordinate a little bit of pizza. And, you know, it’s kind of pretty simple. And I think it’s, you know, kind of makes my job more enjoyable day to day because, you know, we kind of bring these different speakers in, talk about different topics, and it kind of gets some discussion started within, you know, within my teams that I work with every day. So that’s an interesting point is, you know, has anything that since you brought the meeting into your office, and you’re trying to get people from… from your own company to be participating, has that made any, like, change? Like, have you adopted some new techniques or technologies? Maybe you learned about through the group that now you can take back? Well, I found we… Most of the people that I work with are real solid. They’re usually on top of this stuff. And I actually ended up… Sometimes we’ll get a speaker coming in to speak on a topic that I’m not too familiar with. It’ll actually prompt me to ask my coworkers about it. And I’ll be surprised about, you know, the level of knowledge they have. Sometimes. So, you know, a lot of kind of more front-end programming that I don’t necessarily do day to day. But I would kind of get conversations going at work about those sorts of things. So it’s, you know, it’s been a good experience for me. You know, it’s certainly a good way for me to just… Because I’m not necessarily always the most proactive about kind of going out and learning new things. Right. So it’s a good way for me to kind of do that. Yeah. So it kind of keeps you… Because you know that that user group meeting is coming up. And there’s… Yeah. If you haven’t followed up on something, you know there’s going to be a topic. Right. That’s right. That’s right. Cool. All right. Well, thank you very much for sitting down and talking. Thanks a lot. This is Max with Washington, D.C., All Time App Group. Thank you very much.