Sandro Mancuso

Hi, it’s Mike here again at Software craftsmanship North America. I’m sitting here with Sandro Mancuso. Sandro and I interviewed last year. Sandro was one of the first interviews I ever did with Uptastic, or amongst the first. And he runs the London Software craftsmanship group. You’re affiliated with a team that runs the Software craftsmanship group. When I first sat down to interview you last year, I had just launched the idea of Uptastic. And it was just basically focused only on user groups. And now this year, it’s grown to be user groups and tech conferences. And then also the people that are interested in it. Speakers, authors, FOSS developers, and community influences. Which is my wall of cards for people that are interested. You know, and it sounds like… London Software craftsmanship group has also grown. So what I’ve been doing has grown, and what you’ve been doing, it sounds like, from what you’ve described, has grown quite a bit. What is the state, one year on, of London Software craftsmanship? Yeah, I think that when we spoke last year, we had about 420 members. One year later, I checked this morning, I think that we have 860. Holy cow. Yeah. And also last year, we were trying to figure out how we would deal with 400. How are we going to deal with 400? Yeah. 800? And then all of a sudden, things went out of proportion. So we tried to have more meetings. We decided, I think that I said that last year, that our plan was to have more meetings instead of making our meetings bigger. Right. Because… When you say bigger, what does that mean? For example, our round table meeting. It was limited to 35 people, but we have 40 people on the waiting list. Okay. So that’s actually 70 people. You said you have 30 that attend, and then 40. Yeah. So there’s always this massive waiting list in the meetings that we were running. And so it was clear to me that either we would make the meetings bigger, or have more meetings. Right. And we chose the latter. So how many meetings do you have a month? So now we have five meetings a month. Holy cow. And we decided to make them very different from each other. Because another thing that we noticed was that not every person feels comfortable in a hands-on session. Or not every person feels comfortable on a group discussion, or in a social environment. So we wanted to provide different types of meetings in the evening, in the morning, so we could satisfy the majority of our members in one way or another. Okay. And they respond to what the needs of the group are, and provide different forums, formats for different… That could include everyone. They feel at least once a month there is a meeting that they feel very comfortable to come along. So that was… And one thing that we decided to do is we kept the promise of the first year to never have any technology-specific meeting. So every single meeting that we have, even the hands-on sessions, they’re always, always language-agnostic. Oh, really? Yes. So you’re focused truly on techniques. Indeed. Not necessarily, this is Ruby, this is JavaScript. Yeah. London has a very rich ecosystem of communities, like Chicago does. So every time that we feel the urge of running a Java session, there is a Java community for that. So we direct that to the Java community or to the Ruby community. But in the Crossmanship community, I don’t want to alienate a single member. I think that regardless which language they use, regardless which level of seniority they have, they should feel welcome to come along. It makes it harder to organize, mainly the hands-on session, but that’s what we decided to do. And it’s been very successful. And so when you have… Obviously, the group is getting a little bit older now. And one of the things I’ve heard about is, from other organizers, is how to keep, as people have been in the group longer, their experience level increases. So a lot of times the topics are a little more entry level. So they lose interest and move on. But how do you deal with that in such a large group? That’s just a very interesting question. Because I remember once we ran our hands-on session, then we went to the pub, as we do in England, every session. So this guy came along and said, “I found this session today very easy.” Right? And I said to him, “The session was not good. The session was not easy. You made it easy for yourself because you came to the session with your default toolkit and you used that.” So for example, if it was easy for you to do in C#, why haven’t you done that in Clojure? Or why haven’t you used a different framework? So there’s always something you can be a beginner at. Absolutely. So if it’s something that you know, so there’s no point in doing that. So do something different. Challenge yourself. There’s always something there as a structure for you to do whatever you want. Kind of like with the code retreats. Go in and flex a muscle that you don’t use very often. Exactly. If you’ve done the Game of Life 100 times in Java, start doing Clojure. You’re right. Right? Start doing other language. So push yourself. So I always say that to people. And I think that doing that, then they’re finally with this mentality and then everything is okay. And last year, you did a few different things. You had described that you were starting a mailing list. Where did that go? How has that been since then? Yeah. It’s fine to have a global mailing list for all the community organizers that we met here at CNA Europe. It didn’t work out well. No one contributed, including ourselves. Yeah. I joined it. And then within a few weeks, I was in. And I have to say, there’s nothing wrong with the format. Well, I should say, not the format. There’s nothing that anybody did wrong, at least consciously or intentionally. It was just that I was in a place myself. And I think a few other people. We’re social. And having a mailing list felt kind of wrong because it was a closed thing. It was almost like feeling like, oh, this is just for the organizers. And it was like, why don’t we just do it in the open? So, you know, I don’t think this was no slight to anybody. It just wasn’t a natural feeling. Yeah. I think that it was an attempt to bring all of us together. Right. Didn’t work. So that means that this year we need to figure out something. Something else. Yeah. To do it. But we need to integrate. We managed to do that well in Europe. But we don’t use any tools. We are very close to each other. But still there is this big gap between the communities in the U.S. and communities in Europe. We are not aware of the communities in the U.S., all of them. And you guys are not aware of our communities in Europe. Well, there’s – even in the U.S., there’s gaps between – even within the same geographic region, there’s gaps. It’s a little bit more insular. And that does bring up – you were working with a few different groups. I remember that there was a Germany group. And I believe a Paris craftsmanship – Paris Software craftsmanship group. Do you know where they are? Absolutely. That’s what we decided to do for our second year. Because we had a quite good first year. And we thought that we could do more. And do more meant that we wanted to see more craftsmanship communities in Europe. And I was traveling around, going to many conferences, speaking in conferences and all this kind of stuff. And every single conference that I was talking, I was saying, I want to go back home knowing that at least one of you in the audience, you want to start a craftsmanship community here. Right. And I – and for my surprise, people were interested. And they came to me. And then we shared ideas. And we told them how we were doing, what we were doing. And then we kept this contact going on e-mails and helping them. And they – all these communities were formed in Europe. Very connected to us. Because that’s how the seed was planted by us. Right. And then there is this conference in Germany, the Software craftsmanship conference in Germany, that’s been running for two years. And this year they reserved some of the spaces for the communities in Europe. So we could get together. So it was intentionally, we’re going to keep some space open so we can bring people in. Exactly. So they opened a few spaces for some of the communities in Europe. And then they opened to the general public. Oh, wow. That’s very cool. That is awesome. So it’s very collaborative and very much, hey, we’re all in this together. Exactly. Let’s take care of each other. Exactly. Well – So, yeah. So now I think that in Europe, because we know each other, we go to the same conferences, we – the communities, they were creating the same model. So we are far more well-connected. Okay. Well, thanks again for catching up. Well, my pleasure. My pleasure. And hopefully we’ll catch up again next year. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.