Foojay Podcast #13: Denver and Boulder JUG

Transcript

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[0:00] Hello and welcome to this new edition of the Foojay podcast today we are traveling to the us where we will visit two Java user groups welcome J podcast talks about OpenJDK we started the Foojay podcast Jack World Tour in Manchester last December last month we were in Dubai and now we are on the other side of the world in the U.S to meet the people behind the Denver and Boulder Jack hi my name is Greg ostrovich I started in Java in the late 90s when I was working for what is now CenturyLink it was U.S West and then it became Quest and when I was working for us West I got my Java certification I went to a no fluff just stuff event hosted by Jay Zimmerman in 2001 and I think that’s also when I really started going to the Java users group in Denver which met on du’s campus I’m not sure if Tom Marsh was running the group then in 2001 I started to work for the Colorado Department of Transportation and use Java for some back-end data manipulation and a swing GUI app that’s how old this was for human resources to view data that they needed to work with my name is zetty chunfong in my day-to-day life I’m

[1:18] An engineer working in kotlin but I started a long time ago in development also and I learned CC plus plus and Java in school but early on in my career I was doing a lot of DOD work and we mostly the CNC plus development I think when I started working for a telecom companies is when I started having to learn Java and that’s when I found djug and I used to live in Colorado Springs at the time and so I drive up come to the meetings every so often but I don’t think I think it was around 2010 when I decided I wanted to volunteer because I was coming a lot and before the pandemic I was doing a lot of the announcements and most recently I’ve been taking up the role of dealing with the sponsors so my name is Chris weino I’ve been using Java since the 90s also I’ve used it in a variety of settings from embedded to very very large Enterprise systems I’ve also used it in science settings including NOAA the national oceanographic Atmospheric Administration the national Center of atmospheric research and most recently at the national ecological Observatory Network which is funded by the National

[2:39] Science Foundation yeah so my name is Matt Rabel I got involved with the Denver Dragway back in the early 2000s I went to school for not computers I got a degree in Russian international business and finance and then got into open source and Java in the early 2000s found the Denver jug and started going to meetings you know frequently for 10 years 15 years and then I think it was 2015 or 16 I decided that I wanted to get more involved and help find speakers and help find venues and been doing that ever since and I’m Frank Del Porter technical writer at Azul doing some Java development since 10 years but I’m overwhelmed with the amount of experience we have in this podcast we have two Jacks in the room how long do these jocks exist the boulder judge started quite some time ago by Jay Zimmerman who has gone on to host conferences around the world related to Java Technologies no fluff just stuff and he’s president of Big Sky Technologies I was a long time member and I had eventually like others stepped up and took over the leadership role about 20 years ago Boulders world famous it’s a kind of

[3:48] Like a silicon Silicon Valley of the Rockies we have a very we have a lot of Nobel Prize winners in town we have several Federal Labs the community continued to develop I even in years past had meetings with people like Eric Schmidt who had ended up was it son at the time and he ended up building the Oracle campus which was Sun at the time as a result of that and now we have a very large Google campus here as well it’s a separate and distinct Community but we’re we’re very closely related to the Denver Community also so the Denver Java users group started around 1994. Corey klossmeyer started it and kind of moved on to other things and we used to meet at du’s campus when I first started downtown and then I found the agile group was meeting at the quest Auditorium and so we were able to use that facility and then we were meeting at an educational institution in Lowry as well as the Auraria Campus and we’ve met a few other places and we’re kind of trying to figure out where we’re going to be right now because after covid things have kind of closed off as far as some of the places we used to use I’ve

[5:09] Actually been to the boulder jug too and helped out by running that on a few meetings for Jay and it’s and they’ve they’ve kind of floated around to you but they found a place that’s really good for them I started running it around 2008 ish somebody had stepped away from the group and so I kind of picked that up around then so yeah we’ve been around since 1994. so next year you will have a big Jubilee 30 years of having a joke I hadn’t thought about that but yeah I actually did a few I think the Manchester Jack they realized during the podcast recording that they existed nearly 10 years so I think because of kovitz the events stopped and everyone switched to online or some of the drugs switched to online events was that something you have done in bowler and Denver switch to Virtual jokes yeah so that actually worked really well because we were able to pick up speakers from all over the world and it’s just the timing is kind of interesting I mean we had a speaker from Scandinavian country that it was like three in the morning during our Java users group

[6:19] Interestingly our attendance hasn’t been as as good online it’s it’s more available but I think maybe people watch it later Matt program records it and we broadcast on YouTube but I think it’s better attended when we can do it in person if you know that works better and I want to go to Matt and zetty because I don’t want to hog it all what do you guys think about that I agree our attendance suffered a lot you know for me a part of what drew me into this community originally was just in person interaction there was a lot of networking and we were a group before Meetup even existed so I think it was you know a more natural organic Community the attendance numbers were awful it just didn’t feel the same well I think you say they’re awful but like online and they actually weren’t that bad right we had like 20 or 30 per Meetup and you might think that that’s not very good but I watched an angular like broadcast and that’s like multiple thousands of people in that community and there’s like 10 on the podcast or 10 on the video right so I think a lot of

[7:29] The streaming stuff that happens you don’t get a lot of people watching it in real time you get a lot of people watching after and I think the biggest benefit of us doing you know that kind of thing during the pandemic was we really kind of grew closer with Chris right and we did a lot more coordination because he was on the same Meetup and we’d broadcast the stream yard you know having all of us on there as hosts so even though there’s a lot of downsides I think we grew closer together as you know Boulder and Java jugs and now we’re cooperating better but we also get a lot of people now that are like is this going to be broadcast right for our upcoming meetups and we’re like no it’s too much work we’re just gonna you know in person and if you don’t live here maybe you shouldn’t have joined the Meetup right am I correct I’m not from the US so that’s a far away country for me is it correct that your 30 minute drive away you know it’s probably more like 45 minutes when there’s no traffic problems so what we did traditionally was that we would schedule back to back so that as in the old days speakers

[8:31] Would travel around the country quite a bit or even around the world so we made it worth our while that we would be older it would be one night and the following night would then be at the Denver night and that really worked well for the membership because many times as people have had issues with their children or whatever they would selectively pick and go to one or they would even go to both so after the pandemic we collapsed to one night and we still often do that and we do whatever we can to accommodate each other’s groups to make things go well and I want to throw out here this is where you know we Chris had mentioned Jay Zimmerman Jay has some different Java venues for learning he would bring in speakers for his venue and then even offer tickets to The Venue and so what we would do is you know would leverage that back to back as Chris just said so that a speaker came in for a no fluff thing and then they would speak at the boulder Jug on a Tuesday night and then the Denver Jug on a Wednesday night and so that did work pretty well seems a very nice collaboration if you can share your speakers like that also

[9:41] Our state the mountain range runs north south and most of the most of the large cities and urbanization is snugged up against the eastern North South so the boulder tends to get the people from the northern part of the State and Denver tends to get more from the southern part of the state so it’s more than just the physical separation it’s the cities to the North and the cities to the South so you’re covering actually a whole area around Denver and Boulder yeah it’s really great how is the format do you have mostly one speaker two speakers how do you organize The Jug events we’ve kind of done both for the longest time we used to have like a basic concepts kind of thing in the beginning like from I don’t know the like the first hour of the Java users group we would do like you know pizza and socialization before we start we would do a basic concepts thing and then we would do a more advanced topic we’ve really folded that into just really one speaker for the Java users group for the Denver Java users group and I think that’s just been you know easier to fill speakers we’ve also done some some sort

[10:54] To breakout groups if you will we had a study group mid-2000s on design patterns and so we would meet outside of the users group for that and there were some other ones as well I don’t remember on the topic so Chris yes about yours what Greg said okay you agree on everything that’s that’s very nice but I’m abusing a bit these podcast recordings because we’re restarting the B Jack the Belgian Jack one of the ideas we have for the March session is to invite new speakers and see if we can attract people who never spoke at The Jug or at another event and maybe try this for the first time with the short session I find it pretty difficult to find these people is that something that you have done training new speakers or people who want to do this for the first time here are some of my tips for finding speakers and Matt is an actual speaker so he is a he is a wealth of resources so probably you should answer this question also but for me more as a pedestrian jug person what I do is I have looked at our past meetups and the well-attended ones the popular speakers will contact those we try to schedule out the meetups at least

[12:18] One to two years in advance and we’ll email and message potential speakers we’ll give them a schedule of you know 10 to 20 dates that they can pick from in the future to help accommodate their scheduling we try not to leave it to last minute doing it like that another really clever trick that I’ve discovered is that I poached speakers from other meetups so I’ll go around the world and I’ll look at other meetups and I’m also a member of several of the other large meetups and I’ll contact speakers of talks that I think were really good similarly Matt’s been booking for us for a while which has been great I’ve used you know Jay as a resource to find people the other thing is as Chris has said other user groups so we’ve been I don’t want to say poaching but I used to attend the Denver open source users group and we would sometimes pull speakers for topics that were Java related because there were some non-java topics as well in addition to that there’s a Colorado Springs open source users group and they’ll they’ll poach speakers from the Denver open source users group and from our group

[13:30] The other thing is as I had mentioned before the basic concepts doing that sort of shorter talk is a great way to cut your teeth and to have speakers you know try speak taking for the first time in what can be a little bit of an intimidating environment but the other thing we’ve done that I would recommend is we’ve done lightning talks for our recent December get together we did them on fun topics not related to technology at all I did one on how to juggle somebody did one on fostering cats but the lightning talk format is really a tight a time box tight format and it’s so it’s a little easier and you rotate slides I have a thing I did on cups which is a print spooling system to convert HTML to PDF and I did it as a lightning talk and in that format I just had like I don’t know how many 50 slides and they just Auto rotated so it was a five or ten minute talk and that might if you did a collection of lightning talks for one of your meetings what a great way to present some information but also maybe call some speakers from that list that you might be interested in having to a

[14:42] Basic concepts and or be a featured speaker I’m glad you mentioned the lightning talks that’s the first thing I thought of I think that’s been great since we’ve been doing that and I guess get a lot of people the reason why we say you know we let them know they can be any topic that way they can feel comfortable presented on whatever they want to and they can you know just have fun with it so yeah yeah there was a bit the idea we had so we I would next Jack we have one speaker Gareth Grunwald who is very experienced he has a very technical topic but in front it can be anything it’s just developer life related but yeah it can indeed be anything that’s a great Point we’ve done a lot of talks that weren’t necessarily Java specific but were maybe Java tangential but even developer tangential developer life how to learn maybe how to learn some new topics related to the technology how to organize it and then how to work with it team we’ve done talks that weren’t necessarily just pure Java and that’s those have been great as well I ended up taking over from Google the Colorado kubernetes and Cloud native Meetup which

[15:53] Has a large membership also and I help with the boulder devops Meetup and they all meet at rule four and Boulder which I’ll talk about in a bit the upshot what I figured out was that in addition to having Co meeting our two meetups was that I also mash up those meetups sometimes if a topic is of interest to those groups and people can self-select if they want to go or not you know really people are using multiple Technologies it’s not just Java and those three are kind of closely related so I’ve found by co-scheduling those three note meetups will have a fairly large in-person attendance and how many visitors do you attract in average because I know that’s going to change a lot 60 plus sometimes I would say for sure it depends on the topic slash speaker it’s pretty healthy numbers I don’t think we ever cared about tracking the attendance until we move to meet up and I’ve been thinking about this because I it took me a while to remember why and I think what happened was we kept running out of food and because we existed before Meetup we had a message board you know that we we’d send out

[17:10] Information about meetings about and then because we’ve existed so long I think people just got in the habit of you know second Wednesday of the month then you win the show up so not everyone everyone was RSVP and so then you know we started trying to track numbers but I think the largest attendance we have on record was for Redcat I think what was it 122 people showed up so thencat was a huge draw the other one we did and I was going to talk about it you asked about the most remarkable session we had Grady boots he drew about 150 people or more in what was the quest Auditorium the local phone company had a huge Auditorium that we were using for their training and stuff and when we had Grady that was packed but then cat’s an awesome speaker yeah we used to meet a Computer Associates when they were rally software in Boulder and I think there were many employees there that would just come after work and a couple times we had in excess of 200 people wow yeah it was crazy but then for security reasons though we had to move out it’s an interesting question because now we can’t even find a place in Denver

[18:23] That’ll seat more than 20 five like Chris doesn’t have a problem he’s got you know a place that’ll have a hundred but I haven’t been able to find a company in Denver that will give us a place for free for you know more than 25 people so it’s a struggle still because of the covet measures they want us to hire security guards like we used to do pivotal right and then move to VMware and VMware basically had a conversation with them a few months ago and they were like we got a higher security guards going to cost you 250 to meet up right and we were like well we don’t get any income so we can’t do that that’s a totally different situation than for Belgium indeed a lot of companies are interested because not really for the hiring process but I think it’s good for a company to have a joke as an event coming with a speaker that they self-arranged so it’s just the venue that they have to give you but indeed if security guards are needed and yeah the custom can go up a bit indeed intellectual property and having high-tech people wandering around in a facility reliability concerns also especially if there’s alcohol involved

[19:28] Some other jugs actually have membership and charge for their membership and I think that’s how they help pay for stuff and we talked about that and I think we kind of decided you know what let’s just kind of go with our format which is we’re free and basically a service to the public that does make it challenging as Matt said since kovid for finding a venue but that’s been kind of nice after kovit restarting is a problem we had our first in-person Meetup at least in Denver in January and it went well but like I said 25 is the max and the cool thing was we packed it right like it was full and on Meetup it said 50 people so we always have that and it worked out and I think you know I’m speaking next week and we aren’t quite to 50 yet but we’re we’re gonna try and keep the same venue just because we haven’t found another one that’ll give us space right and so you know we’ve talked about capping the number because you know you don’t want 50 people in a 25 person room right but we’re having no problems getting people to show up we’re having problems getting a venue to house other people another

[20:35] Thing that kind of changed with covid in addition to the venue as Matt mentioned is our sponsorships we had a lot of sponsors who would pay for food tchotchkes giveaways door prizes Amazon was a sponsor for a little bit and they’d give away like their the little pucks the Alexa pucks and some different things and Matt’s company OCTA he gave away some books of his and some other stuff from OCTA but a lot of the sponsors that would like buy gift cards that we would give away kind of went away and I think you know trying to draw them back in is a little bit of a challenge we’re really fortunate we’re at a we’re a rule four in Boulder Colorado rule four coming from Isaac eisenhoff it’s kind of a very playful emerging technology and cyber security company they have a lot of very kind of exotic toys a lot of electric bikes things like that they’re outside magazines best places to work they lavishly cater our meetups with hot plates and you know it’s using Indian or Mexican or some such thing so we’ve been very fortunate in that regard and the venues and how they welcome you and what they offer as an

[21:54] Extra drinks and foods is really great indeed you already mentioned a few of the most remarkable sessions Matt do you also have one that keeps popping up in your head I remember the Grady boots went pretty well and it was I also remember the funny story I tell about it wasn’t Grady himself it was a guy that I hadn’t met yet who became a good friend of mine and that’s Bruce Snyder I remember seeing him from across the room and you know my younger self being kind of naive I was like man that lady keeps asking a lot of really interesting questions right and it’s because he had long hair right and so I remember that one well and then Bruce and I became good friends because of the meetups because we would always go and then we’d socialize after so that kind of made me think when we when I start getting involved that we shouldn’t do the basic concepts because what was happening with the basic concept says it was a regular talk and so you’d end up sitting through two long talks and you’d miss out on the socializing at the end because everyone was like it’s nine o’clock I’m done right and so

[23:00] That’s why we voted with our community to see if they want to do one talk and that’s why we kind of went there but yeah Grady boots is probably my most memorable one and there’s there’s lots of ones with vencat that we’ve had you know before the pandemic that were like holy cow this room is full I want to throw out in addition to vencat and Grady was Kathy Sierra now she stepped away from a lot of stuff because of threats which was really sad but she gave a talk on Enterprise Java beans and she did all those head first talks head first books for O’Reilly and so we actually acted out in ejb that you know putting it in the container and you know persisting to the data database and that was so much fun and I just remember you know her thing her stick was you know making it fun so that you would learn and really enjoyed that talk as well I wanted to throw that out it was a long time ago obviously since it was Enterprise geographs yeah but you have a long history of jugs so I did want to mention along the lines of the worst talk that we’ve had I won’t say who it was but we’ve had some architecture

[24:06] Talks and so I would ask that you might want to avoid that you get it it’s kind of you know you get a company and they’re like oh you know we’ll provide stuff and but they’re basically going to sell a product and for us our audience does not like that but we had one speaker that didn’t know the technology they were talking about and the audience kind of called him on it I mean he would say stuff and they were like no that’s not right at all so the one thing I would also tell your speakers don’t BS your audience if you don’t know the answer it’s completely okay to say you know what I don’t know let me find out and get back to the get back to The Jug and have a post that answer I really like the small amount of people in the room of a jug that really go into interaction with the speaker and the last joke we had there were some issues and it was a early release and some errors popped up during the presentation but then you have the whole audience cooperating with the speaker to fix this issues so that was really great and that’s really fun if that happens and you bring up another great

[25:11] Point Frank is that a lot of times at not just Java users group but any kind of meetings I go to I learn from the audience they’re often experts in the technology as well where there are experts populated throughout the audience and that interaction not only for troubleshooting when the demo invariably goes wrong but also they might be using the technology in a way the speaker isn’t using it and there’s been some really great interaction on that as well you know we try to counsel speaker workers that are less experienced to be succinct and try to stick within an hour to an hour and a half and not to get carried away with excessive coating keep it simple it’s a learning experience and the ones that get brutal and where everything blows up and they can’t make things work we’ve all seen that I would add to that another great tool and Chris that was awesome is practice there’s a there’s a guy Matt McCulloch he went to work for GitHub who is from here and he and Tim Berglund and a few others were local speakers Matt did a book on presenting on presentations with I think Neil Ford and one of the things that they talked

[26:22] About in the book I did the tech edit for that was practice in real time in other words don’t just go over your notes for your talk do an hour-long session of your talk in real time before you do the real thing for an audience because nobody does that or most people don’t and it’s really key and then record it using a webcam or whatever or just a camera in your room and look at that see how you’re doing see if you have a lot of ums and Oz and you can really kind of fine tune your presentation before you go prime time that’s an international speaker you might want to ask him yeah but do you have tips for new speakers who is going to speak at the first joke well it’s funny because I’m the one who screens the speakers right and we have a cfp that’s you know been open we usually open a new one every year and a lot of times I will make people basically you know or not make them but ask them you know are they showing code in their presentation or will they be doing any sort of demo right and if they say no then I’m like I don’t think we’re interested right and so you know I tell them we prefer live

[27:35] Coding and stuff like that and it’s funny because I’m not going to name names but there’s there’s one person that I’ve been negotiating with for a talk and I think it’s going to be a great talk but they’re doing it on behalf of someone else and so what they did is they actually created a video and sent it to me about how they want to you know present the talk and the material and that to me is like something a salesperson would do and I’m more turned off than I was before right if he had just said yes we’ll take April and here’s the abstract I would have been done right but instead he’s like no it’s going to be a really good talk let me show you how and it’s not from the person who’s doing the talk right I think it’d be different it was from the person doing the talk but you know for new speakers I think a lot of times it’s it’s what Greg said it’s practice and I’ve learned this more during the pandemic than I ever have before because of doing screencasts and editing my own screencast so I think you know maybe like Greg said you know turn on the webcam and try to turn that talk into an

[28:36] Actual screencast because what you’ll find is if you haven’t practiced you’ll do so much editing that it’s really painful right like you know record for an hour you edit for eight hours and you’re like God this sucks versus recording where you did a bunch of practicing beforehand the editing only takes a couple hours right because you never made any mistakes so you know practice is key but it’s really hard to do right no one likes to do it and that’s why you know speaking at jugs can be helpful because in these times when we’re not recording it’s very I think free and you can make mistakes and everyone’s supporting you right versus like a conference not so you know free of an environment I mean you would be speaker because I finished the book just before covet I’m the king of bad timing so I was going to do jokes and conferences but I only did virtual ones I’m afraid to do live coding I have to be honest people like fan Cuts they are Masters but yeah they practice and they do it every day I’ve hung out with Josh and venkat and they practice relentlessly they practice like hours before their talk right like they don’t

[29:45] Look like you know they’re practicing but they are they practice a whole bunch the other thing too Frank is the more you do it the better you get just running The Jug I have some people that attended from when it started when I started attending who have said you know you do better and I think that’s just because over time your skills get better I was shocked once I ended up watching a Peter Gabriel concert from behind the stage and what I was shocked was that they’re teleprompters that all the witty bander and everything was all prescripted that they were just reading off the teleprompters I think with all these big concerts I think if you go to the same concert a few days you just hear the same jokes and stories and just like you say it’s all been practiced and repeated as you said you had some some these lightning talks do you really train people to get to become a speaker no we haven’t done anything that to help them become speakers and in reality and the last one we were struggling with the venue and we’re struggling with sponsorship and stuff like that and so

[30:53] We didn’t even announce the lightning talks to like a week before and then and it was like Greg and I and two other people or something like that it wasn’t that many the Foster cat talk wasn’t planned I just asked somebody to do it there we were talking about stuff and she said okay she put it together before her talk at the meeting so that was pretty impromptu and it was great it was good talk do you have specific plans for the future yeah first finding a venue again and restarting fully after the covet but just getting back to schedule I think that’s the main plan well we’ve been on schedule right it’s just been virtual and so we started our first in-person one in January and we haven’t had a problem getting speakers I think you know the biggest problem is the venue and then once you have the venue you can do all kinds of things and one of the things that we’ve never been able to do is we always meet on the second Wednesday of every month and we always get these International speakers that are traveling through the U.S and want to do a jug tour right but we only meet on the second Wednesday of every

[31:58] Month so we never are able to do anything to accommodate them so I would love to find a venue that would be like yeah you can do Tuesday night or you can do next Thursday or they’re always open for us to you know do a meet up so of course we would need you know the actual people right to show up but we do feel like with you know 3 600 members or something that if the topic is appealing they would right but it’s you know it’s you got to advertise it a month ahead of time to get people to show up and it can be tough to do if you’re like next week we’re doing a meet up you know Matt is actually the guilty party here so our venue allows us to meet pretty much whenever and we invited him for next Monday night and he’s like no way that’s football night so we pushed it back a night so we’re hosting Matt next week to talk about oauth we’re looking forward to that the other thing too that Matt had had mentioned before to us that I want to bring up because I thought it was great is I feel like we have a set of attendees that is maybe older and not any of the new you know new

[33:08] Graduates from school and we did get some people from some of those those private institutions yeah like code schools but Matt has talked about us drawing in younger younger people to attend but also to help run it and I think that’s great and I do think that’s the future of The Jug and I want to definitely try to accomplish that as well and I was the mix of your visitors young old male female definitely and mostly male but you know the great thing we have going for us for as long as I’ve been helping out there’s always at least one woman developer in attendance so that works well in our favor yeah definitely mostly mail I think what I was seeing pre-covered a lot of mid-career people were looking to learn I think early on a long time ago like the mid to late 2010s or around there it was a lot of older developers older male developers but it’s definitely been coming down a little bit I think the challenge for us even myself there’s there’s so much you can learn technically especially on YouTube right so I think it’s great we’re gonna try to attract younger people I’m just not sure how yet when I

[34:25] First started to go into Denver juggles because I needed a job right and so I think you know we’re kind of back in that era where maybe we weren’t there six months ago but now we could see people coming just to network and try to get the next gig you know so hopefully that brings the younger folks in we get some folks like that and but what I want to also add is that if you pay attention sometimes there are people with basically no I.T or computer science experience and you kind of have to well you don’t have to but as a nice person you want to be able to Mentor them and let them know what they’re in for and how realistically they can get from A to B and that’s also a lot of I think the Meetup experience is mentoring people with career issues or technology issues or co-worker issues those types of things also the other thing too is with not meeting online but meeting in person I really enjoy just meeting up with my friends that I haven’t seen in a month at the Java users group I have a lot of people that I’ve met through the group and that’s been really great some of them have kind of moved on but you

[35:36] Know you talked about just jumping back to the speakers real quick Matt McCulloch really cut his teeth at the Denver Java users group The Open Source users group and the no fluff stuff before becoming kind of an internationally known speaker as well as Tim Berglund Matt I don’t know if you started with us when you were writing some of your first books but what a great way to kind of interact and meet with people that are actually using the technology not people just kind of talking about it I think for some people the talk is not that important but what happens after the talk and the drink before that’s a great Point Frank we do for our Java users group we would have a meal before the talk just kind of pizza or whatever that we’d have the basic concepts when we first started when not doing it anymore we do our future talk but afterwards we go to a bar and hang out and Matt’s company has been very generous about sponsoring food and drink at that and we just hang out and talk about stuff it doesn’t necessarily mean technology and it’s just been really great that’s been a lot of fun so I

[36:43] Would recommend if you can do a social thing after after the meeting’s finished that’s that’s been really good literally all of my ski Rock and Ice climbing partners are through the jugs that’s been great a very nice side effect so another question from my personal point of view for the Belgian Jack our idea is to have locations in different different locations and then see if we can attract a community in a city and maybe split up again in different drugs do you have some tips to organize jugs at different locations and attract new people new speakers new visitors I was just going to say I think that’s a great idea if you can find venues in different cities I’ve done some drug tourism the last several years I even did it last year in Ireland and the UK and the funniest thing I discovered is the best organizer was a recruiter and so it was the guy who runs the berry runs the Dublin jug if I contact him and tell him I want to do a jug tour and cork in Dublin and Belfast and you know in the UK he arranges it all and he’s very motivated because he’s a recruiter right to get people there so I think you know it’s

[37:54] One of the things traditionally with our jug they’ve been like online they’re kind of a pain right they join the mailing list and spam the mailing list and you’re like ah right but for people looking for jobs especially if they’re at the Meetup they can be very helpful so I’ve even thought if we got new leadership or younger leadership like it might be good to partner with a good recruiter as well to kind of you know have that motivation definitely see if you can team up with recruiters we’ve had some different recruiting companies sponsor us from the beginning and that’s been a big source of you know help with the sponsorship but also like they provide you know like provide food and some other things and sometimes a venue so that’s going to be really helpful to you and then as Matt said you can get people that are looking for work that’s been a draw for us as well and I think that’s that’s really been a great symbiotic relationship Matt if you schedule a world tour you forgot Belgium I think yep I I’ve been meaning to do Belgium and Germany so they’re on my wish list Belgium is

[39:00] Very small so I can understand that you forgot that you just overlooked it I love those and the beer is so delicious oh that’s the maybe the main argument to attract news Chris what is for you the most important thing of a jack of a community event I think it’s just bringing together a common community of experience that we’re all going through variations of the same thing the value of sharing those experiences and how things could be better with technology or work processes is that something you can add I think making people feel welcome I know for me you know back when I first started a tent and it was very intimidating and I was I joined just in time for the design pattern sessions and that was supremely helpful so I think a lot of people they show for the first time you know they’re a little intimidated they randomly hear about the group and they’re not sure so I you know if I see a new face I try to go talk to them ask them why they were there and I try to guide them on how they can get what they need out of the group so yeah just making people feel welcome thank you

[40:12] Greg for this most important for you for a jerk I like what’s already been said and so I’m not going to repeat it but those are really important things the other thing is basically the pepper information to people that might not otherwise have access to it so maybe in your work environment you really do server-side stuff and you’ve never done other things that you would get exposed to in the Java users group at my own work we are starting to do we have been for a little while more devops type stuff and that’s been around for a long time but I was first exposed to it at The Jug same with the design patterns users group that we did I really didn’t learn about them from the gang of four but there’s another book and we had a speaker and then that users group that little breakout group was a great way to learn the technology and then share that at your workplace as well so it’s been a it’s been a great way to learn things I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to yeah we already have a lot not something you can add I’m glad that Community I think I’ve really enjoyed the open

[41:17] Source community in my life as well as like the Java community and the Denver job community and even other communities like you know the Denver Nuggets is an NBA basketball team and it’s fun to root for them right the Denver Broncos not so much they’re they’re not as good in the NFL but you know being a part of those groups is very rewarding when it’s going well right and you know for the sports teams it’s a little different because they struggle and then it’s tough to be a part of those groups but you know with Java like it seems like we’re all rooting for the same thing right and we’re all rooting for each other and just trying to get better and you know do our careers and make a living and it’s fun to do it with other people you can see their successes okay I will add to the show notes of this podcast some links so I have the Meetup link for the Denver Java users group I also have the Meetup for Boulder Java user groups are there a few other links I should add there’s djok.org do you have that on your list not yet we also have the YouTube channel which is youtube.com denverjug it might not be as active right going

[42:26] Forward because we’re just trying to get people in person and get a venue but you know if we start getting 100 people a meet up again and I feel the desire to start recording them again that could certainly get active again yeah the recording is definitely something which makes the event harder to organize right good thank you first of all guests of this episode and you for listening keep an eye on Foojay for future articles about development and everything related to the Java world and let us see what our Joker World Tour will bring us next month