Mike Jansen

Hi, I’m Mike with Yucatastic. I’m here at SCNA Software craftsmanship North America. It’s a month full, but I’m sitting down with Mike Jansen who runs the 8th Light University at 8th Light here in Chicago. Hi Mike, thanks for sitting down. Thanks. What is 8th Light University? So 8th Light University is, it’s every Friday event that we have over lunch at the 8th Light office in Chicago. And it is a chance for our craftsmen to basically kind of give back to the other craftsmen that work at 8th Light and also to the community at large. Yeah, I was going to say, is it an in-house only thing? So it started out as, you know, back when 8th Light was maybe six or seven people, we started doing, you know, sessions every Friday where it was kind of a lunch and learn. Then it got a little… It got a little more formalized that we want to do, everyone to do three sessions on some topic. So not just your typical one hour session on something, but a really much like a deeper dive into some topic about software development or something interesting that they’ve been working on. But these were people that were working at 8th Light? Yeah. With like apprentices and… Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so very small start. But as we started to move down to the Chicago area, instead of just being up in Libertyville, we really started opening up the 8th Light University. So we started, you know, set up the RSVPs, major appeals would come in and we ordered lunch for everyone. And so now at our new office, we’ve got a little bit more capacity and we’re up to about 60 people on a regular basis coming in for 8LU on Fridays. And it’s, so it’s a little bit out of the education, the social aspect. It’s not, they come in and it’s a class. It’s more like, like a mini-con form, I was just saying. A little bit. So it’s… It really works as a way to, to get people that are just finding out about 8th Light, you know, are looking for an apprenticeship or, you know, they’re just in the area and they want to come and learn about something, you know, there’s a chance for them to stop by, have some lunch and, you know, learn about whatever, whatever topic is coming up. And those topics can really range all over the place. So was 8th Light University your first kind of foray into organizing community or? Probably my first formal one. You know, I, you know, I had a past job. I would organize little mini-training sessions, that sort of thing. So it really felt like kind of a natural fit when I got started at 8th Light of, oh, I can, I can do this. I can, I can get people to, you know, get up and talk. Yeah. So, and then it’s really just, I mean, the, the people that I work with at 8th Light, Susan and Angelique, they’re both real good at helping to make sure all the, all of the bits and pieces, all the, you know, details get taken care of. Yeah. And it also helps having an army of apprentices that can arrange chairs. Yeah, yeah. Go forth my minions. Yes, exactly. So, and, and are they recorded? Do you publish them out? Yeah, we, we post the videos on Vimeo. We have a Vimeo account and we put the links up to the videos on our website, university.8thlight.com. Okay, I was just going to do the next question. Yeah, yeah. University8thlight.com, okay. And so it takes a little bit of time just to process and upload them. So they’re maybe a week or two behind most of the time, but you can find a lot of our videos there. Okay. For, you know. Past maybe a year or so of, of talks. Was there been any like highlight talks that were really like, yeah, this is, this was fun. Yeah, so every, about once a quarter we have Uncle Bob Martin come in and he does a talk on it. I usually don’t find out until maybe three days beforehand. So I just kind of say, all right, Uncle Bob’s coming on Friday, you know, and then people RSVP right away for it. So those, those are always a lot of fun. We’ve had some good ones. We had one that’s on. That’s one of our craftsmen did on the Go language and that was really interesting just to kind of see, it’s not a language that really is used much outside of Google. And so he was really passionate about it and really got people kind of very interested in trying out Go and seeing how it would work for one of their projects. So has that led you guys to take on any Go projects at any time? It’s, it’s kind of opened our eyes internally. I think he’s still fighting for it. I don’t know if it’s made it into any production code yet, but it’s something that people are playing with. All right. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down. Thanks a lot. Thanks.