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 I now have a total of three unpublished articles in the backlog: one on closures, one on code loading, and one on how to make progress on sticky problems.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!
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
