angleBracket w/Pat Paasch & Clark Sell

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m sitting down with Clark and Pat. This is Pat. This is Clark from Angle Bracket. Angle Bracket is a user group up here in the northwest suburbs and actually we just came back from a meeting. So Pat, Clark, can you tell me a little bit about Angle Bracket and what you guys are doing? Angle Bracket is for guys and gals, I guess, that we’re going to be unpacking some code. Speak up? Is it not loud enough? Yes, speaking up is great. We’re in a bar and this is what we do after Angle Bracket. So what is Angle Bracket? What did we just do today? So we’ve tried to form together a number of web developers like yourself to come and meet once a month and take a topic and just code it. Somewhat unstructured/structured, so I haven’t talked about WebSockets. We kind of kicked it off by talking about it, warmed up into Error’s Pod for a few months. We just started coding and then kind of revisited back at the end, right, until people switched it around and kind of switched it around a little bit. Mike kind of bounced around a few groups, but this is kind of the hands-on of user groups. Yeah, and unlike most contest interviews, I participated in user groups and I’d say there were a number of things I liked. One thing I liked was that there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. One thing I liked was that there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. One thing I liked was that there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. One thing I liked was that there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. One thing I liked was that there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. And I’d say one of the things I liked was that we had a topic and then it was kind of like some people worked on .NET stuff, some people worked on Jasmine and Node. Some people, well I was working on Pusher with Ruby. So, you know, it was… It’s all front-end web stuff, right? No bounds around other than front-end web stuff. So how long have you been doing, Rebecca, is this the second or third? About three hours now. Yeah, yeah. So this was the first time. This was the first meeting. This was the first meeting. Okay. And so what did you guys learn? I know you’ve been involved quite a bit with the user group community in Chicago. You still are a dev evangelist. Yeah. So, you know, obviously you were able to bring a lot of what you’ve experienced going to so many groups. Why this? Yeah, why this? Why did you decide on this one? Get away from the user group experience. I mean, something different. Yeah. I think we said it in kind of this slide before, right? We all sit at home and code. We all learn. And that’s usually by ourselves. Yeah. And I work alone a lot of times. I work alone all the time. I think getting experiences from different people on how they perceive something or use something or use it differently or ask different questions only further enhances what you learn. So getting hands-on and being able to do it with my friends, I think, is even better, right? Yeah. And that’s what tonight was about. Hopefully, as time goes on, the source repository that we’re all working and pulling back into, we can grow a set of assets that, you know, when you walk away and say, “Oh, well, we were doing this WebSocket thing. I forgot, right? I haven’t been using it for a month or two, so it’s kind of falling out of my brain.” But I know, hey, I can go to angle bracket on GitHub and I can just go grab that, and I should be able to refresh myself. Oh, by the way, Pep did this thing in WebSocket. Oh, that looked pretty cool. Mark did this thing and then did that thing. Maybe I’ll look across all three of these. So that’s kind of the point of it, right? So kind of you want to build up a body of knowledge. You want to use these groups more to help not just learn together, but also build something that people can go back and use as reference. Cool. I think one of the pennies that I bet you didn’t want to be selfish, but the point is to kind of be selfish in what you want to learn. That’s using it. So if you want to learn something, you can take that to the meeting and say, “I want to learn this,” and find someone else who wants to learn it, too. Yeah. And we went around and asked, “What do you want to get out tonight? Is this your two hours that you spend away from your kids, your whatever?” And you should walk away with something that you want to learn and find somebody that has similar interests to you. And, you know, like even with the pusher for me, it’s something I’m working on, a side project, and it’s a whole priority for me. And normally when I sit down and think about what do I have to do on this project, being able to sit down for this two hours and be like, “Well, one second is a theme. Let’s dig up from the back of the backlog and bring it up,” is not even an excuse to do that. So that was a lot of fun. And someone might have experience with pusher next time we go there. At least call someone that makes that experience with something else, right? That can help you. I mean, do you want to struggle on that alone? Yeah. I’m kind of tied to that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had guys do a pusher, Jasmine, Node, SignalR, .NET Ruby. I tried to get Node Inspector running, bailing miserably. Remember we had 15 people maybe, 10 people. So, I mean, yeah, that’s a pretty broad breadth of technology. Yeah. Along to just . So, I was impressed. The level of participation was pretty awesome. Well, it looks like you’re off to an auspicious start. So, anyway, thanks, Clark. Thanks, Pat. Talk to you guys later. We’ll be right back.