Interview with Dave Thomas at GOTO Chicago 2015

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here again at GOTO Conf 2015 , and I’m standing here with the grandpupa, the godfather, not grandfather, I’m dating you, well actually I’m not dating you, but I’m here with Dave Thomas who has helped bring GOTO Conf to Chicago and with it all the other events that are around GOTO Conf. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Well, it’s great to be with you again, Mike, and we appreciate your support of the user community in Chicago. Yes, I was working here just before the financial crisis, and we made this plan to bring a conference to Chicago with a few folks like Dean Wampler and a bunch of other user group folks, and they said, well, you haven’t delivered. So we decided to come back. This is our third year, and it ‘s great to be in Chicago. We love doing these conferences in cities which have a great tech community that sometimes can benefit from having speakers come from outside. I mean, the Chicago community by itself has got so many great speakers that we like to have them at our conferences , other places, but this way we can have some different accents perhaps come and talk about some different things. And one of the things I like about GOTO Conf, and I was talking with people out on the floor, is when I go to a RubyConf, I kind of know everybody who’s there. If I go to a .NET Conf, I kind of know everybody’s there. Everybody kind of knows who the speakers are, but when you come to a GOTO Conf, there’s people that kind of blow your brains out of the back of your head, but you might not know them because they’re not necessarily in whatever sub-commun ity usually gets represented. I think that’s really the mission we have, is really to try and make people aware of great people and great developments in the industry. And our PCE works very hard to try and… To find new speakers, try and track different trends, and we have a pretty high turnover ratio with speakers, and we actually have a rule that we won’t ever have a speaker speak in one city three times in a row. Oh, okay. So we try and involve people covering a broad variety of topics, so really thanks to our international PCE who are constantly digging out speakers, and we also try and bring on people that aren’t well-known, which is a bit of a… That’s one of the reasons we have this sort of long introduction in the morning, is that often people, they know about the brand, right, so-and-so who wrote the 20 books and is very popular and so on, and that’s always great to have them, but we often have some real up-and-com ers or some people that have done some really unique work, and we try and feature them as well. And I think that’s one of the people’s things. People come in and they say, oh, I’m going to go to this talk, and all of a sudden they hear about this, and they say, oh, there’s really two of us here from the company. I think I’ll go to the other one, and then they’re both going to the talk that they didn’t plan on going to, so if that works, then I think it’s a good idea. So a little bit of serendipity, you know. And just seeing some of the credentials for some of the speakers, I mean, seeing JPL, seeing NASA, and the names of the credentials for some of the speakers is kind of mind- blowing. I’m going to go hear somebody who’s actually put stuff in space, but then you can also turn around and go learn about JavaScript and how they do the best techniques. So JavaScript, it’s a really broad spectrum. Well, I think one of the things that, you know, I mean, focus conferences are really valuable, incredibly valuable. You go to your language conference or your platform conference, and they’re really, really, really good because of that. You go deep in your particular set of skills. But, you know, in a world that’s changing, breadth and depth are important. So we try and go long in some of the other areas. I mean, we were pimping functional programming. Pimping functional programming a long time ago with a lot of people staring at us very strangely. And now it’s moving more into the mainstream and into main languages. So we try and sort of push the edge a bit, and we sort of try and say, look, this isn’t just academic stuff. This stuff is actually in use. So we try and find people that cross over. And so the people come and go, oh, wow, you know, I’ve actually learned something new and different. And maybe I’ll go to that other user group for a change. Yeah, exactly. You said the one I go to. Every month, right? Yeah, exactly. It’s about a little bit of a, what was it, the polyglot programmer, the polyglot community member. Yeah, the quote, you know, Dean Wampler, who probably started the polyglot popularity. Yeah, yeah. So, well, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me, Dave. I appreciate it. It’s great. And thanks a lot, Mike, for your work with the community and to all the user group. I mean, community is made by people and people who are willing to put their time in and do things, really need the support of the community. So thanks very much to all of you in Chicago as well. Yes, thanks. We love having you. All right.