Stephen Anderson

User groups with lots to say, interviews and more, no way, sharing great ideas in the tech community. Fascinating conversations, a plethora of information, find out for yourself today at uktastic.com. Hi, it’s Mike with Uktastic. I’m here at SCNA 2013 and right now I’m sitting down with Stephen Anderson who has up until recently ran the Mad Railers group up in Madison, Wisconsin. Thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. I understand that you were running this group for a long time, but some life events have come up and you’ve had to identify how to transition the group over so that way it could still exist. How did you go about doing that? How did you identify the plan? Well, the group was passed. To me, in 2007, my friend who started the group kind of asked me if I would take it over because he was moving on to make some other things happen on his teaching front. Just like he had started a Rails class in 2006, he started an iOS development class in the Tech College in 2007, very cutting edge, and he was just clearing his plate to make something new happen. So I was running. I ran Mad Railers for years, but along the way, even though I was kind of the figurehead and the person whose picture was on the users group, there were many other people who were putting in as much effort as I was. I was just the point person who kind of chose who to delegate to on a frequent basis. And part of the time, the dynamic was kind of a core group of us making things happen. And part of the time, it was me. Or someone else in the core group just delegating and making sure that an interesting event happened every month. Right. There was a point years ago when I started, maybe not years ago, at least between two and one year ago, I’d already started talking about maybe it’s time to pass the torch, find somebody else to run it who will bring more energy than myself at this point in time. Mm-hmm. My intention. My intention was to kind of, like they do for many of us, you know, what you’re passionate about goes through phases and different steps. And I’ve become really interested in the dynamics of running, building, growing our business, which is a different set of skills that I’m really intrigued and pulled towards. And I waited to pass the torch. I waited to pass the torch until it was pretty clear. This year, it was very clear because Zach stepped forward with a vision for content, refreshing the content, making it more attractive to the most experienced Rails developers. We had made a very successful effort to make the group attractive for new Rails programmers. And now, so Zach pointed out that that was kind of… causing us to be disengaged, causing our most experienced Rails community members to be disengaged from the group. So, let’s swing the pendulum back. Right. And he’s been doing that and in recognition of the fact that he was doing more for the group than I was, I asked him if he’d take it over. So, it was a happy transition and it sounds like he was already somebody that you had been fostering in a community and then handing more and more of the responsibility over. Is that…? I wouldn’t put it that way. Zach is, I mean, he didn’t need any fostering. No, he’s somebody who makes things happen. Yeah. And my business partner, Brad, is working with him to run the users group. It’s the two of them currently and I’m sure there will continue to be a larger extended core of people running it. I wanted to step back for a couple of reasons. One is to let the group refresh with more energy and more enthusiasm than I was bringing to the table. And also to clear my plate, I’m trying to get things to fall into place so that I can teach a night class at UW-Madison in the spring, web development with open source tools. So often, as professional programmers, we like to complain about the gap. The gap between what we do and what is taught in computer science curriculum. So you’re looking to find a part of the world to close that gap. Yes. And that’s exciting to me and it’s going to be challenging. I taught five classes of Rails at the Tech College and it was a great, fantastic experience. I think there’s going to be, I’m going to take a bit of a different approach with the university. And I’m looking forward to it and I hope everything falls into place. Do you think, well, one was that it’s kind of funny that the last person that handed off the group went to teach and now you’re going off to teach so eventually Zach is going to be a teacher. So Zach now knows that his future holds a teaching course at one of the Madison University. He would be killer at it. He would do a really great job. Well, in a few years I’ll be interviewing him and talking about handing off Mad Railers to the next generation. It’s a very interesting thing to see this community that was started and fostered and grown and maintained and nurtured and then it continues on. And I’ve talked with a few people about that today is that we can build things in a way that’s much like our software. We can build it so that way it can be owned by somebody else and it will live on beyond us. We can take that attitude towards our communities and try to build that in a way that when we step away or when we go away for whatever reason, it keeps going. It doesn’t just boop, fall over. There’s some interesting details as part of that conversation. So for example, my company, Brad and I started the company Bendyworks, but it was an offshoot from the users group from Mad Railers. We’ve been very closely aligned with Mad Railers over the years and we have run the events at our offices and bought, you know, bought the food and the drink and kind of been the defacto sponsor a lot of the time. And we’ve had many conversations about is this a good thing? Is it, you know, what are the pros and cons? The pros are, you know, we make it happen. It’s consistent. People know where to go every month. I think the possible cons are we don’t want either in reality or in people’s perception, we don’t want people to feel like the users group is about our company because that’s not the point. The user group should be its own thing and perhaps it’s damaging if it’s a little bit too closely aligned in people’s perception with a commercial company. Yeah, if it becomes the Bendyworks Mad Railers, it can also be damaging for other consulting firms in the area that have developers that would love to go to the user group, but it’s a competition and they might be afraid that you’re going to poach them or… Yeah, well, I never heard… I never heard those specific concerns, but I’m hearing from the people who go to the user group. I’m not hearing from the people who don’t go. Right, right, exactly. Well, consider me their advocate then. One thing that was really cool that happened this year is our public library did a huge remodel and they’re reinventing themselves as kind of a collection of maker spaces. Oh, really? Gorgeous tech meeting spaces that are larger and better equipped than rooms that we specifically remodeled space in Bendyworks to allow. The library is a step above that, so we’ve moved the user’s group to the public library, so that helps as well. That’s very interesting that the local community would be recognizing that need or desire. Do you have any insight into how that came to be? I talked to the gentleman who is… Kind of the impetus at the library, and he tells me this is a national movement, that libraries are struggling to reinvent themselves, and one of the things they’re turning towards is providing a public space and venue for teaching people how to make things and to share skills. That’s interesting. Well, good luck in your new venture, and I hope the class turns out really good, and thanks for all those years of putting in. The effort on man-railers. Well, thank you, Mike. Yeah. All right. User groups with lots to say, interviews and more. No way. Sharing great ideas in the tech community. Fascinating conversations, a plethora of information. Find out for yourself today at uktastic.com. Thank you.