Meeting People (Online) is Easy
When’s the last time you sat down with a stranger and had a conversation? How often do you call someone instead of texting? Today’s internet has made it easier than ever to reach a huge number of people, without ever really getting to know them, especially for those of us in the tech community.
As designers, developers, and entrepreneurs, there’s a purity in seeking advice, validation or amusement from nameless strangers (or familiar acquaintances) online. It’s efficient, safe, and on your terms. If things get boring or awkward, you’re just a click away from something else.
There’s a growing deluge of ways for us to sit in silence and interact with people in our community: Facebook. Twitter. Skype. Slack. Snapchat. Eyelid (OK, I just made that one up). Some online communities offer more intimacy than others, and to a large extent, they’re what you make of them. It’s up to you how much you want to engage, how much you want to share, and how much time to dedicate.
This is true both online and offline, but I suggest the benefits of more intimacy often come as a surprise. Since there’s no quantifiable pay-off from dedicating more time to our online relationships, it’s often easier to stay a little bit removed.
There’s something magic that can happen when you are sitting across from someone and have to stare at their face long enough to think of something to say.
These online communities shape our lives in fun and unexpected ways: An update about a job offer, a restaurant recommendation, a movie review surmised of 140 characters, the list goes on…But have you ever wanted to get to know them better? If you have, this series is for you.
This article is the first in a series (INSPECT) dedicated to getting to know the developers in our community better.
Dan Hannigan is a web developer and accidental community-builder here in Denver, CO. He created the wildly popular Slack team Denver Devs, which is an online community of developers, designers and “tech” people in the greater Denver area. After a modest, but auspicious, start the community has grown to over 1,500 members.
Dan joined me for a couple rounds at Ratio Beerworks in RINO on a sunny Tuesday evening. With his girlfriend (Jana) in tow, we sipped beer served by hipsters on the patio and discussed becoming a developer, and the origins of Denver Devs.
Where are you from?
I grew up on the Western slope, in a little town near Telluride. It’s close to Norwood… not quite in the mountains. It’s filled with a lot flat fields rolling off into the mountains in the distance. It’s really cool. You can see Utah…the LeSailles in Moab. It’s a really pretty area.
Telluride’s rad. I used to work up there during the summers. Spent a lot of time working and then drinking and then falling asleep outside. I was a bike mechanic & outdoor merch salesman for the Telluride sports store, then I worked at gas station and then I worked at a fancy hotel as a groundkeeper.
Did you see celebrities there?
No, not really. They were always inside the hotel and I was outside sweeping up the sidewalks and shit. Even if I did, it wouldn’t have clicked for a bit. I’m not good at recognizing people…
How long have you been in Denver?
Two and one half years, and I’ve been at 1st Movement the whole time.
How do you like it?
It keeps me occupied. I get to build a whole bunch of random stuff all the time. There’s like ten or eleven folks between here and Los Angeles. It started in LA and then they branched out into Denver.
What kind of projects do you work on?
I’m just front-end, so I’ll do a lot of static builds. We do some Drupal stuff too, but largely I don’t touch that. So it’s usually just a lot of CSS, Javascript and HTML that we’re just pumping out all the time, like marketing pages and site designs... stuff like that.
Sometimes our backend guys are working on it, but usually I deliver to another development team for the client or we drop our own single page sites onto their system and they can go from there.
When I’ve done that, things will often change once real data hits the front-end during integration. Are you on the hook for those kinds of changes?
Not usually. We’re pretty clear with the client that we provide templates, but once it’s integrated into your system, we can provide support, but it’s in their system. We do a lot of work for large organizations like Davita, Wide Open West and Cisco, etc.. and they take a while to integrate things, so if we were on the hook for that, we’d be waiting around a long time.
Who do you work with?
There’s eight people in the Denver office. We have 3 front end devs, 1 designer and 4 account folks.
Do you do this kind of work back home?
No, I was a graphic designer, originally. I went to school for graphic design, and when I graduated I got hired on to web design and development for a small agency in Grand Junction. I did that for 2 1/2 years. It was a little of the same type of stuff, but it was more design-focused than just “dev.”
So what made you move into dev?
I just liked coding a lot more. Design was too loose. it was hard to justify the decisions I made a lot of times. It just felt that way for me, like I’d be like, “I made this this way because it looks cool…” That’s how I thought of that, anyways. That’s how I was approaching it.
Once I started working in code more, I got to spend more time building things, which I liked. I just worked better in my brain.
I like more of the data-driven stuff, anyways. Like, whenever I was doing design a lot of it started to become data-driven. I’d pour over their analytics and make my choices based on that, which worked, but I felt like I wasn’t really designing anymore, really. I was letting the data tell me where to go. You know, it’s hard to argue against numbers. I was like, “Do you want to be better… have more sales, etc…” and nine times out of ten [the client] would be like, “Yeah!”
So that helped me get into dev.
Oh yeah. People make a whole career out of just doing that. Not even developing things, just researching and making recommendations on what the next move is. Do you do any of that sort of stuff over at 1st Movement?
Typically the teams we work with do that. We just set them up with the tools and and the framework they can use. From there, they can pretty much go wild. I think it works. We take care of a lot of the “red tape” for them. From another agency’s perspective, we come in and say “Hey, this is what we do. We’re experts in it…” So it’s easy to say “This is what we’re doing now.” Whereas internally, they might have to go back and forth forever debating what to do.
One of the reasons I’ve found the Denver Devs so great is getting opinions on new frameworks and tools…
Usually there’s multiple viewpoints, too. Which is nice. it’s not just a “hive mind” of the same opinions. If it becomes a “hive mind” I’ll just shut it all down (laughs).
Did you imagine it’d become so big?
Not at all! When I first moved out here, I only knew a handful of people, and we would get drinks every so often. We would @handle everyone on Twitter until we reached the character limit just on @handles and be like, “Let’s go drink!” (laughs). Then we’d drop people off of it and be like, “You’re not invited anymore because you don’t fit” (laughs).
So when I saw Slack, I was like, “That’s seems cool. That’d be a way better way to organize going and hanging out with all the devs.” So that’s all I started it for, honestly. And now it is what it is.. people invited people…
When I joined about a year ago, there were only 200–300 people and it already felt like a well-oiled machine. The sign up process was very fast…
Yeah, I wanted to remove all barriers for people, even non-developers (designers, etc…). We had considered moving it to another platform, but I thought, “No, every company is using Slack now anyways, and it’s just an extra team… so who cares?”
I wanted to keep it as non-technical in the front as possible, so that everybody can join in. Because, I feel like I’m not even that technical. Sure, I’m a developer, but if you start talking too “tech-heavy” to me, I just can’t keep up. I’m checked out. I’m thinking about other things.
That might be part of what helps it grow. I’m still trying to figure out what helps it grow.
I try not to moderate it too much, either. At the beginning there were a lot of little “tension points.” Like, we had our core group, maybe about the first hundred people, and there were a lot of varying opinions about how it should run, what it should be, and how it should behave, which was great. That forced me in particular to be more open about a lot of things, and be more aware of things.
For instance, I was like, “Oh yeah. We do need a code of conduct, because that’s a great thing to have.” Initially, I thought, nah everyone is cool, but it made me realize, just in case, it’d be a good thing to have.
It’s great. I hardly ever have to do anything. It takes care of itself. I think everybody who wants to be a part of the community is being a part of the community in there by chatting and being active. The people that actually care are chiming in when they want to and pushing it where they think it should go and I’m OK with that. I don’t know where it should go, so I’m down with plenty of other people helping decide.
Have you had any crisis?
No. Never. Only ever very minor things. Like people will come to me and vent, which is great and I welcome that 100%, but I’ve never had to ban anyone or anything.
I feel like the scale of Denver helps with that. We’re still pretty close-nit. You may run into these people in real life, so if you’re a jerk online, it could come back to bite you. I think a lot of people have that in the back of their mind. Plus, there’s no reason to not be civil.
