Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis. Monthly contributions from community members help make that possible. If you like what I'm doing and want to support it, please find the PayPal subscribe button at the bottom of this post. Currently I have 76 subscribers for a total of $800/mo before PayPal fees. This is not yet nearly enough to live off of, but does help offset my expenses.
Not as much publicly visible work has happened over the last two weeks as in previous weeks because I had to focus on making money. But now that I've done that, I will have some free time once again for getting back into Mendicant mode, for at least a few more weeks.
Practicing Ruby
The second part of the Thoughts on Mocking article has been posted to the RBP Blog. As I mentioned in previous progress reports, I've also been working hard on Practicing Ruby: Volume 2. I now have a total of three unpublished articles in the backlog: one on closures, one on code loading, and one on how to make progress on sticky problems. All three of these articles have been sent to the Mendicant supporters, as a way of saying thanks for their monthly contributions and also because I could use the feedback!
Mendicant University
Even though this is a recess month, we have a lot of exciting things going on at Mendicant University.
Last week I came up with an idea for a weekend hackfest focused on "coding for good" in some form or another, and our alumni had lots of interesting thoughts about how we could go about doing that. We're having a planning meeting some time this week and I should have an announcement out sometime between now and the next progress report with some of the details. This will be an online event that is open to anyone who wants to participate, and will happen some time in October.
We are also experimenting with the idea of running a Mendicant University podcast. It won't necessarily be about programming, but instead be about various topics our students, staff, alumni, and friends find interesting. We've already recorded one episode and shared it with the Mendicant supporters and alumni, and we plan to start publicly releasing episodes within the next week or two.
Yesterday I met with Shane to start the planning for the September core skills session, and we've already worked out most of the ideas for the exercises that we'll run. We are working hard to make this session our best one ever, as it will be the opening session for Mendicant University's second year.
Today I am meeting with Jordan to overhaul our code review request system in university-web. This is one area of the software that has fallen out of sync with the way we run our courses, and so I'm excited to be able to fix this before the September session starts up.
Prawn README Overhaul
A while back I promised the Prawn core team I'd replace our aging and out of date README with a more streamlined and modern one. Now we have exactly that. That having been said, all the real documentation in Prawn is thanks to Felipe Doria's amazing Prawn by Example manual.
RubyGems
Before I dig into other issues with RubyGems, I decided to scratch my own personal itch by trying to get the maintainers to use an official blog for making announcements. This is something I proposed back in June and Nick Quaranto immediately did the legwork on, but the core team never got around to testing out what Nick set up. A few days ago I published at test post to blog.rubygems.org and confirmed that things worked as expected. It's just a simple Jekyll based blog on Github pages, so it's very easy to work with.
We still have some things to get sorted out on that blog, such as deciding whether blog.rubygems.org is the right subdomain, or if news.rubygems.org would be better. We may also do some style tweaking and cleanup of the archives, but most of that I'll leave up to the RG maintainers. What I want to see is release notes getting posted to blog.rubygems.org every time there is a new release, and perhaps a monthly summary of what's been happening on the project and where they plan to take it. We should be able to make this happen within the next few weeks.
The guides have been seeing some love from Erik Michaels-Ober and Gabriel Horner over the last few weeks, so I haven't been focusing on them much. That said, I will definitely look at any pull requests that come in, so feel free to contribute if you can.
In addition to the above, I've got a couple issues I'm working on investigating within RubyGems, but I rather announce them once I've dealt with them, rather than making promises I can't keep. They're minor things, but things that have been annoying me that I'd like to see changed.
Software Development for Beginners (Training in New Haven, CT)
We'll be running a community session for beginner software developers here in New Haven tomorrow. I'm going to try to either record some of it, or make some really good class notes so that folks reading this blog could benefit from the materials or at least share them with someone who can. I'm excited about tomorrows lesson, because it involves MineCraft ;)
Want to Contribute?
If the things I'm working on sound worthwhile to you and you want to support it, please subscribe! It will help me keep doing good stuff for the community without having to focus too much on making ends meet. I've been doing this since December but only recently started accepting funding, so it will really help me counterbalance several months of burning through my savings.
I have a friend who people pestered, half-jokingly, to interact on Facebook. He refused to open an account. He later revealed to me that he /had/ opened an account. As he told it, he signed up at 2 AM on a Saturday, and within 24 hours, he had over 200 contact requests. Most of these were from people he hadn't spoken to in 10+ years.
His thought was, if any of these people wanted to make the trivial effort to contact him (or vice versa) during that vast span of time, they would have. If they really wanted to be friends, in the present tense, in any meaningful sense of the word, they wouldn't have waited for the social networking / viral marketing soup du jour to "enable" it. This wasn't enabling at all; it was a burden.He cancelled the account that same weekend.I doubt you share precisely the same motivation, but speaking as one of those who jumped on the new Twitter account without having engaged in any deeper interaction first, I think I understand.People aren't capable of having deep relationships with hundreds of other people. Most relationships are necessarily shallow. The trouble with the current social tools is that they tend to be binary, or at least they start out that way: We're connected or we're not. If there's a middle ground, it may be limited to a select list on a form. The tools aren't smart enough to detect that I'm never going to have an interest in what person X's kids are having for dinner, or that person Y is really, really excited about his faith, even if these are people I otherwise enjoy spending time with.And then there's this <http://xkcd.com/386/>. Try as you may to avoid it, it's just a matter of statistics.We have a long way to go before the tools are capable of externalizing a meaningful subset of my preferences when dealing with other people. I probably won't be happy with anything less than a semi-autonomous filtering agent. For now, I use the tools sparingly and I refuse to take them seriously.
Given what we have to work with today, I hope you can find a balance.
One thing I used to use twitter for is recording links for future reference while simultaneously sharing them with others. I will be trying to use my blog for that purpose now, so here's a link dump. It's worth mentioning that several of these links come from my favorite link blog, Trivium.
Want to reach me about this or something else that's on your mind? Email me at gregory.t.brown@gmail.com or find me in the #seacreature channel on Freenode.
UPDATE: Even though I've left twitter, Mendicant University has not. You should follow @mendicant_news if you want to keep track of the day to day happenings at MU.
I'm sure I'll cave in and go back to old habits within a week or so, but for now I've decided to quit using twitter.
I haven't deleted my accounts because I don't want to have to rebuild my social network if I do go back at some point, and also because I want to keep them around for archival reasons. I want to experiment with more slow-cooked communications, and with making deeper connections to the people I interact with. I already have the Mendicant University alumni network and the Ruby Mendicant supporter network for discussing things with people who are interested in my work or working on projects with me. I plan to use those more often now. I will also blog here more often, so perhaps that's a positive side effect.
But I suppose I will need at least *some* replacement for twitter, and for that reason, I've created the #seacreature channel on Freenode. It is currently public with everyone having voice, but I may change that later if I feel like it. I will also of course frequent existing public channels for projects, but this is the channel I will use to post random links, engage in random discussions, and also hopefully, allow my friends to meet each other and have some cross-pollination of ideas happen. For more focused Ruby discussion, I'll probably use the public #rmu channel, so that our students can benefit from those conversations, but we'll see how it goes.
Yep, this sucks even more than two twitter accounts. But we'll see how it goes.
Today I decided to start splitting up my tweets across two accounts. The account most folks have been following (@seacreature) will be used for tweeting announcements about projects I'm working on, as well as links to things I find interesting. This account will remain public and is still the best place to keep track of what I'm working on at any given moment. Pretty much everything else, including any conversations, will be done through my new private account (@gregory_t_brown). This is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass for me and has some downsides for the folks in my extended social network, but I think the experiment is worth it.
In the last three months, I've gained over 300 new non-spammer followers on twitter. My primary account is now followed by close to 1700 people, where I think a year ago it probably was watched by no more than 400 or so. This rate of gaining new followers is MUCH faster than than I could reasonably get to know the people who want to interact with me. When you add in the second tier effect of seeing followers of followers join into conversations, it means I'm spending more time talking to complete strangers than I am to my friends. While a bit of random interaction keeps things interesting, it is not something that scales upward gracefully.
Here's something that I struggle with all the time: I am emotionally impacted by pretty much every statement that is made to me or about me, and typically feel the need to respond to any question or comment someone has for me. When I am friends with someone or at least know who someone is and appreciate their work, I can apply a lot of context to my interactions with them, which helps prevent me from getting too worked up about disagreements or conflicts. In fact, I really enjoy healthy arguments with people I know and respect, because they challenge me and broaden my perspective on things. However, the same cannot be said for arguments with strangers.
More and more often on Twitter, I find myself in faux arguments with people who I feel either don't know or don't care about the relevant experience I have which forms the basis for my opinions. Similarly, I don't have the means to get to know everyone I interact with at even a superficial level, so I don't know how to evaluate their attitude on things. These arguments are usually silly, because they resemble something not unlike what you find on Reddit: people talking at each other rather than to each other. This is made worse by the fact that you can't help but be aware that these conversations are happening out in the open, in which a few thousand people could potentially be watching and judging your each and every move. I would like to think that it doesn't influence my behavior too much, but it'd be ridiculous to say it has no impact on me at all.
So that brings me to my experimental splitting up of my tweets. I like the broadcast functionality of twitter for sharing news about my projects or links to my writing. I like being able to have concise conversations that can be overheard by friends who might throw me a curveball every once in a while. But I don't like being a talking head getting rattled at by other talking heads, and maybe this change will prevent me from feeling that way. It's worth a shot, at least.
NOTE: I've also disabled comments on this blog, for the same reason as I mentioned above. If you want to respond publicly, write a blog post in response. If you want to respond privately, email me!
UPDATE: Eleanor now has the funding she needs to make it to NOLA for RubyConf. Thanks for stepping up, folks. This post is still possibly worth reading for the broader point about conferences and communities.
Hi folks,
I have a favor to ask of you. Please help my friend Eleanor get to RubyConf. She didn't ask me to write this appeal, but I feel like it's necessary to do so, and I'll explain why.
Eleanor has been in the Ruby community a LONG time. She was working with Ruby nearly a decade ago, which means that she was around when I started Ruby back in 2004. Folks who have been around that long represent a very small part of our population as a community, but are very important because they possess historical context that many newcomers lack.
The primary way I've interacted with Eleanor is through conferences. I don't particularly follow her day to day work, and now that we're not hanging on the same mailing lists and IRC channels, I don't bump into her regularly. But I make a point to catch Eleanor at every conference I see her at, because the hallway track conversations I've had with her have been some of the most fascinating that I've had in my life.
I've seen Eleanor talk several times, and the opinions that others have had about her presentation style have been varied. She picks super hard topics that are easy to get lost in, and sometimes that happens. I personally find her style fascinating, but I'd be lying if I didn't say she can ramble on at times, or go off on tangents that seem to lead to place far from where she started. But whether you love or hate her presentations, that shouldn't let you miss an important point: Conferences are about people, not talks. I know there are a lot of deserving people who can't make it to RubyConf, but since I know Eleanor personally, and since she has such a peculiar background, I want you to help her out.
People are often hesitant to donate to things like this. They think that someone else will do it. Unfortunately, Eleanor tried and failed to raise funds to get to LSRC 5, even though she had an accepted talk there. They think that they don't have enough money themselves to help others. However, what people really seem to think is that if they offer $5 or $10, it'll seem like too small a donation to be worthwhile, and they're not comfortable giving large sums. If everyone who had that though just ponied up the $5.00, this pledgie would be closed already. They think it's not their responsibility. It isn't, but again, conferences and communities are about PEOPLE, and helping people is a good way to keep communities strong and make sure our conferences are full of interesting people.
Eleanor is like me: she has given up offers for significant commercial gain so that she can focus on open source and on community. Even if this does not affect you directly, having more people like this in our ecosystem would be a good thing. So please, go to pledgie right now and just give $5 to Eleanor so that she can get to RubyConf. It will be a better conference if you do, and the community as a whole will benefit from whatever mind warping ideas Eleanor puts in peoples heads, both on the stage and in the hallways.
More folks need to adopt a social investment mindset rather than than sticking to the narrow possibilities of economic consumerism. This is one small way you can do that, and I don't think you'll regret it if you do.
Those who would like to help financially, but can't do so for whatever reason: please just show your support by spreading the word on Twitter or wherever else you might find people who can help.
Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis. Monthly contributions from community members help make that possible. If you like what I'm doing and want to support it, please find the PayPal subscribe button at the bottom of this post. Currently I have 74 subscribers for a total of $788/mo before PayPal fees. This is not yet nearly enough to live off of, but does help offset my expenses.
Practicing Ruby
Last week I mentioned that I have decided for a number of reasons to start my paid newsletter Practicing Ruby back up. Within the next few weeks, folks will be able to Practicing Ruby volume 2, which will be a weekly newsletter sold for $8/month. But for now, I am working on getting all the volume 1 articles released under a Creative Commons license to the RBP blog. Six articles have been released since the last progress report, which means there are now 19 articles in total available for free. I'm working on building a nice index for them, but for now, here are some links to the most recent ones:
There are still 7 more to be publicly released from volume 1, but I've already begun work on volume 2. Members of the Ruby Mendicant supporter network already have access to two of the articles, one on code loading and another on closures. If you haven't yet subscribed, that may be an incentive for you to join, as you'll continue to get early access to Practicing Ruby rough drafts even once the newletter starts up again.
Mendicant University
Shortly after last week's progress report, I announced the plans for the next year of Mendicant University. You should read that article for details, but essentially these plans call for us to create a smaller, tighter program that is more sustainable. However, we plan to counterbalance that by increasing our emphasis on things like our mentoring program, which will allow us to reach a larger amount of people while asking for a smaller time commitment from them. We are also introducing some minor changes to the core skills course that will increase the amount of impact Mendicant University has on the open source community (and vice versa) by connecting students with mentors from popular open source projects.
Our admissions process for the September core skills course was wrapped up in a flash, with the course filling up 24 days before the exam deadline. That goes to show that the demand for spots in our courses is still extremely high, perhaps moreso than it has ever been. This is simultaneously a good and bad thing, because we wish that we could accomodate more people, but we also want to make sure we don't grow too quickly, either.
In more recent news, our July core skills session just wrapped up, with six students successfully completed the course. You can find the list of new alumni, the exercises from the session, and student projects in this announcement.
NOTE: Last week I mentioned we were close to releasing a new public site, but that plan has changed due to us shifting our priorities to other things for the moment. I'll let you know when we have more news about that.
Ruby Rogues Session
I participated in another Ruby Rogues session, this time on metaprogramming. This was a fun session, but I actually kind of hate the topic. It gets me all worked up, and someone even commented after listening that I tended to interrupt the other panelists too much. That person was right, and this podcast would have been better if I hadn't done that. I guess it still turned out to be an interesting talk at least. :)
minitest-helpers
I put my minitest helpers that I mentioned in a previous progress report up on Github, so that others can try them out and contribute to them if they'd like. However, I may decide to go back to trying out minitest/spec and seeing if it suits my needs. If it does, I'll either update this code to be minitest/spec based, or wipe it out entirely. But at least there is now a more permanent place than a gist for it to live and get worked on :)
RubyGems
Now that Mendicant University is in a recess month, I'm going to turn my attention back to RubyGems a bit. Specifically, I plan to go back over what commitments were made by the RubyGems team and get status updates on them. I may also begin working on a guide or two, if time permits and I feel I have enough information to write about.
In general, it seems like some things have gotten better while other things have stayed the same. I've been away from the project for a couple weeks, so I need to dip back in and get my bearings before I can comment further. Expect a blog post with updates some time before the next progress report.
Software Development for Beginners (Training in New Haven, CT)
A few weeks ago we taught our first community session for our Software Development for Beginners course. However, Mendicant University has kept us more than busy, and so our followup session plans got put off. However, we've decided that we want to keep this idea alive, even if we need to scale it back a little. We'll probably try to go with monthly sessions and see how things go from there. Jordan has already sent out a survey to our students to try to pick a date, I'll post an update once we've got more news.
We've decided to charge $20/session for these meetings, even though they're worth a lot more than that. We figured this would put us at a price point comparable to a yoga class or a dance lesson, and that'd give us a more broad cross-section of the community to work with. We contemplated making the sessions entirely free but figured we could use the extra trickle of revenue. That said, we told our students if price is a factor for them, that we'd work something out with them.
Financial Transparency
As my bank account starts to look more and more anemic, I will need to do some commercial work to help me cover my living expenses and travel costs. Right now I'm looking at doing a mixture of work on written materials such as Practicing Ruby, private trainings, and private coaching sessions. All of those things will be relatively fixed commitments and will keep me in the education space, making them somewhat less distracting.
However, because I am asking the community for financial support, I think that if I'm taking in any substaintial commercial income that I owe some sort of report of my revenue and expenses for the sake of transparency. I am unsure of exactly what level of detail those reports will look like, but expect the first one at the end of August. It should at least give you a rough sense of how much I actually need the money from this support program.
Want to Contribute?
If the things I'm working on sound worthwhile to you and you want to support it, please subscribe! It will help me keep doing good stuff for the community without having to focus too much on making ends meet. I've been doing this since December but only recently started accepting funding, so it will really help me counterbalance several months of burning through my savings.
Tonight my wife and I fell victim to what can only be described as a total aerial assault on our home, carried out by an angry mob of house flies. The combination of it being garbage pickup night, the temperature being higher than it has been all year, and our poorly installed air conditioners made us the softest target on the block. One fly in the house is annoying, over a dozen buzzing around feels like armageddon. The fact that I don't intentionally kill bugs just added insult to injury.
But in a bizarre twist of fate, my evening was saved by a junky little children's toy and a little bit of science.
I originally was chasing flies around the house crazily with this little vacuum gun and mostly just getting frustrated. Then, Jia had the smart idea to put the porch light on and kill all the other lights in the house, to try to trap the flies out on the porch. A smaller space made it easier to catch them, but still resulted in a mostly ridiculous game of fly and human in which the fly was impossible to catch until it landed nearby in sheer chance. After struggling for about 10 minutes, we were able to catch the two flies we trapped on the porch and release them outside. When I got back in the house, all the lights were off, and so I turned on the little red light on this cheap plastic gun that I always assumed was a shoddily built wannabe laser pointer. That's when the Eureka moment happened.
I could see a fly sitting completely still on the living room wall, and decided to try to sneak up on him, fully expecting him to fly away at the last moment. But for some reason, he didn't budge at all and I was able to catch him with ease. Before I had a chance to turn the lights back on in the room, I noticed another fly on the wall on the opposite side of the room, and repeated the process. Sure enough, I was able to walk right up to him and suck him up into the gun with ease. This is the exact moment where I realized that flies can't see well (or seemingly at all) in red light!
Within the same amount of time it took us to catch the first two flies, we hauled off 12 more by simply turning on a white light to attract them into the general area, then switching over to red light and sucking up two or three at a time. This was proof enough for me that the approach worked, but I wanted to verify it before writing about it so I'd appear at least slightly less insane. Sure enough, there is a fancy graph from a scientific paper that confirms my hypothesis.
That cliff you see on the right side of the graph is the red light spectrum, in which a fly starts to fail to see an approaching vacuum gun that is perched about 1cm from its face. Clearly, the manufacturer of this silly children's toy that saved me from a terrible night must have known that. It's sort of embarassing to admit that I didn't, but hopefully it made for an interesting story nonetheless.
While this informal experiment was conducted by accident due to my religious practices, I can only say one thing in summary that I might as well let XKCD say for me.
It used to be that every morning as soon as I got out of bed I'd sit down to clear my email and check twitter. The idea was that if I could take care of that first thing in the morning, it'd distract me less throughout the day. That idea is actually valid, but it comes with a cost.
I find that whatever I do first thing in the morning sets the tone for the day. By checking email and twitter as my first activity, I was basically spinning a roulette wheel. Some mornings I'd have a message waiting for me that inspired me, other times there were things that irritated me or just made me feel down. Even if those emotions arose just from some minor issue, I found they'd stick with me throughout the day. After a while I got sick of the rollercoaster ride and its effects on my productivity. I needed a more consistent morning activity to balance things out.
A couple months ago we set up some planter boxes to try our hand at square foot gardening. Below you can see what it looked like when we first started building them.
Because I work from home, I could pick any time of day to focus on working on the garden. But I sort of accidentally got in the habit of going out and working on it as soon as I woke up, for the same reason that I used to check my email: I was excited to see what the changes were. Now, I've never properly gardened before, so what I didn't realize is that change happens FAST. The picture below is from only maybe 5 weeks after we planted seeds and tiny starter plants.
As I continued to work on the garden, I noticed a major change in my overall mood consistency. Sure, some times I'd go outside and see some bad news. One time I woke up to find one of my buttercup squash smashed in half and about 40 feet away from my garden. The zucchini plants you see in the picture above, after giving us a great yield eventually got a disease and I had to rip them out. But for the most part, I'd see things that were good news. The plants would grow bigger, new vegetables would come in. The bees would be pollinating new flowers that had bloomed the night before. But for better or for worse, the garden was a fixed universe with real limits on the range of possibilities for good and bad news in the morning. This is a huge contrast to email, which can bring news that affects your entire life.
Building a garden wasn't an intentional exercise in personal development. Instead, it was an activity that fell into my life simply because I wanted to grow my own vegetables. But when I noticed the positive effects it was having on me, I re-enforced the habits that I was starting to form around the activity. Now, it has just become part of my daily routine and I don't need to motivate myself to work on it. I find that this 15 minute buffer zone between me and my inbox is more than enough to at least partially immunize me from the rapid moodswings that clearing my inbox can cause. I wonder if there are other small hacks like this that I should be applying in my life, because this one certainly worked!
Hello, my name is Gregory Brown. I am the founder of Mendicant University, a free online school for software developers.
I am passionate about community service, education, and the free software movement. If you're interested in getting to know me a bit better, feel free to send me an email: gregory.t.brown@gmail.com
