Trying to promote Scala in company / Allow offering of hosting

[Christian Haas]

Hello there!

I see that the next monthly meetup misses a place (& time). In this regard, I have a little chicken-and-egg problem: I am willing to promote such a meetup to be hosted in the company I work in. Problem is, we so far have nothing to do with Scala.
In order to make it feasible for upper management to allow it, we'd need some stuff that is consumable for non-Scala people. It may be possible to have a section for beginners and one that needs experience.

So, would promoting the language be within the scope of these monthly meetups or is the Scala-at-your-workpace program more suitable?
If we have a program for promotion, then I could take it to management and possibly get some people interested which in turn would allow us to host such meetups :)

Thank you & have fun,
ch

[Rafael Cordones]

Hi Christian!

On 22 May 2014 at 15:43:16, Christian Haas (dert...@gmail.com) wrote:

Hello there!

I see that the next monthly meetup misses a place (& time). 

The rationale for not having a date is that we do not have enough talks/discussion topics/activities to have a meetup. We briefly discussed this between the organizers and did not want to set a date to later find out that we do not have enough *content* to make an interesting meetup. And since we have not fixed a date we cannot fix a place. :-) Finding a place to host the meetup is not the underlying issue.

IMHO, one of the fundamental issues that we have in the group is that we do not have enough talks/discussion topics/activities to meet on a monthly interval as we have been doing so far. Another fundamental issue, from my point of view, is that we have people coming in for the first time (mainly coming from Java) and not returning.

Maybe we have reached a point where we can start thinking about rebooting the format of the meetups? I just came across this post the other day http://blog.factual.com/clojure-office-hours and maybe we could try the Office Hours approach for some of the events to make the group more inclusive to beginners?

We could have:

• Talks event: where people present talks (this is what we have mostly had until now in the monthly meetups)
• Office Hours event: where people getting started in Scala can come (with their laptops, books) to resolve their actual questions/issues with Scala:
• but for this to work we would need to have a core group of people with an advanced beginners to expert level available at that event.
• Study groups: we are doing already this with the "Functional Programming Study Group”
• Workshops: we did this in the past for specific topics (Akka, introduction to Scala at your workplace, …)
• Anyone is welcome to prepare and coordinate more of this!

In this regard, I have a little chicken-and-egg problem: I am willing to promote such a meetup to be hosted in the company I work in. Problem is, we so far have nothing to do with Scala.

Are developers in your company interested in Scala? If so, what prevents them from coming to the meetup? Did they come and find it boring/not interesting and decided not to come back?

In order to make it feasible for upper management to allow it, we'd need some stuff that is consumable for non-Scala people. 

IMHO, the pre-requisite for such and event would be that this “non-Scala people” are *actively* interested in Scala. With “actively” interested I mean if developers in your ORG are not only interested in *hearing* about Scala but whether they are already trying stuff with it.

It may be possible to have a section for beginners and one that needs experience.

How would this section for beginners would look like for it to be interesting for beginners? 

So, would promoting the language be within the scope of these monthly meetups or is the Scala-at-your-workpace program more suitable?

If we have a program for promotion, then I could take it to management and possibly get some people interested which in turn would allow us to host such meetups :)

I do not fully grok what you mean with this last paragraph. 

Would you be willing to invest the (considerable) time to prepare the *content*, coordinate and host those meetups? Is it one or several you are talking about?

What do others think?

Cheers,

/rafa

[Sebastian Nozzi]

Hi!

Very good questions and ideas so far. I think we should constantly question the format of our meetups and nothing prevents us from trying out new things at any time.

@Rafa: I like the idea of "office-hours" very much! And would definitely put me on both sides of the board :-)

Another thing we could do is to try to "rate" the level of difficulties of our talks, and strive to have a ratio of 50/50 between beginner/advanced talks. We would announce the rating on the meetup page. Beginners would be more attracted to attend and maybe even ask questions in the beginner-talks, and they also would not feel like "am I the only one not understanding this?" when listening to advanced talks.

@Rafa: I think the intention of Christian is first to create awareness about Scala on his workplace. It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem. Maybe after being presented Scala for the first time in the comfort of their own offices they will get interested and actively participate in our group.

@Christian: as you are thinking about a possible "bring Scala to your workplace" and you also participated in the last one that Philip organised... do you have ideas of what could be done better / differently?

Cheers,

Sebastian

[Christian Haas]

Heya and thanks for your responses!

> Are developers in your company interested in Scala?

> If so, what prevents them from coming to the meetup?

> Did they come and find it boring/not interesting and decided not to come back?

I believe hardly anyone had a look at Scala at all and possibly only a few know of the language's existence.

I talked with a lead developer who did express interest in Scala, but in our company in general about safety-critical systems, we have extra hurdles to take when switching a language.

It is even nearly as complicated as switching from one version to another; For instance, right now we are using Java 1.6 and think about upgrading. With 1.8 still quite fresh, we might only make it to 1.7 .

As Sebastian has pointed out (in the other thread, see below), a switch from Java to Scala might not be that fruitful;

Under that aspect, we just might have to wait out until Java 1.8 is released and make use of its FP extensions.

> Would you be willing to invest the (considerable) time to prepare the *content*,

> coordinate and host those meetups? Is it one or several you are talking about?

Heh, no, my intention was by far not to become a curator :) I just took the current case of the pending meetup to connect some of my thoughts.

> How would this section for beginners would look like for it to be interesting for beginners?

I see my erroneous usage of the term 'beginners' in the context that I'm thinking about. To clarify, a beginner is someone who has dabbled with Scala code already, whereas the people I had in mind are some that need to see possibilities and become interested.

> as you are thinking about a possible "bring Scala to your workplace" and you

> also participated in the last one that Philip organised... do you have ideas of what could be done better / differently?

I had my ideas in the other thread here ( https://groups.google.com/d/msg/scala-vienna/PqvdrPaMulo/fbYWKvypJ2EJ ) which I consider good for getting people interested. And looking back to that thread, I see there's a pending question from you, Sebastian:

As mentioned above, perhaps it is better for us in the company to wait for Java 1.8 in contrast to Scala. (Also because of the cost of the language switch: People training, tool qualification, code analysis tool support, FP/OOP...)

The one thing I want to avoid is to stick to the same environment because we just don't know anything else. I'm trying to answer the question whether Scala is better suited for safety-critical systems than Java.

With your hints I believe I found a way out of the chicken-and-egg problem: I'll try to advertise Scala on my own in the company and collect some interested people. With a critical mass reached (if at all), we can then think about a Scala-at-Work session.

As for the idea of "office hours" at the meetups: Although I haven't been at any monthly meetup so far, the format sounds very interesting.

It is similar (or simpler) than an "Open Space" (also referred to in the comments of that blog post), which I have come to love at conferences.

have fun!

ch

[Peter Kofler]

Sad to hear that Scala Vienna is "struggling". To me it was the most successful user group, also due the (maybe not so) new hotness of Scala. If there enough participants but no talks, then other ways of running the meetups may help. If there are not enough participants, then who would use the office hours anyway?

Nevertheless, it maybe helps to divide into beginner/advanced talks every evening. beginners are able to create beginners talks as well. We do that in the R user group since a few months, not sure it will work out. On the other hand, if the same people come back again and again, who needs beginner topics, you should talk about the stuff the members need to know. This may be problematic because it gets more and more difficult for new ppl to enter. Sth similar usually happens at hacker-spaces.

Did you consider that one meetup/month is already enough? Running the study group (successfully) takes away ppl from regular meetups, because there is only so much time one can spend on meetups, right?

Anyway we should join forces with the dojo, which runs fine but has free places for any language, also Scala. Although we run the dojos joint/changing places, the groups do not really mix at all

Just some thoughs, sorry no real advice or help ;-)

[Manuel Bernhardt]

FWIW, I would be able to give a talk about a successful site relaunch
built on top of Play (and using Akka for data migration). But it'd
have to be before the 9th since I'll be off for London after then.

Manuel, jetlagged

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