UPDATE: Text below has been updated slightly to reflect the current plan as of November 2011. Small changes have been made, but the spirit of the original idea has been preserved.
Throughout the first year of working on Mendicant University, we grew faster than anyone could have expected us to. We managed to make it a whole year without a formal plan, growing and changing organically as we worked on finding our way. But with the growth came the growing pains, and a couple months ago we began to worry that if we continued at the pace we were going without at least some minimal planning, we'd burn out.
It took us several weeks to regain our bearings, but now that we have, I'm happy to announce the plans we have for next year. What follows is just a summary, but it should give you a glimpse into where we plan to take things.
These changes will hopefully lead to a more sustainable, stronger program. It isn't quite as ambitious as what we shot for in the first year, but it's solid and I think we'll be able to make it all happen. Our goal was to come up with a plan for our second year that would make sure we'd still be here in our third year, and I think this will do that. Have a question about where we're headed? Just ask in the comments section below.
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 73 subscribers for a total of $760/mo before PayPal fees. This is not yet nearly enough to live off of, but does help offset my expenses.
PuzzleNode
With the help of Andrea Singh (@madebydna), and several testers from the Mendicant University alumni network, I launched four new PuzzleNode problems. Our goal was to create problems that encourage the use of object oriented programming, but they're still very much language and paradigm agnostic. I think we may have accomplished that goal with all but Puzzle #12, which we allowed to be a wildcard.
Mendicant University
Our July session is under way, and eight of our twelve students made it through the first checkpoint. The assignments we are running in this session are very challenging, but I'm happy to see the students rising to meet that challenge. It's been a lot of hard work, but it's also been fun.
We will open up admissions for our September session on Monday, July 18th. Those who wish to get a head start should focus on solving at least two problems from PuzzleNode #9-#12.
Thanks to alumnus Andrew Cox (@coxandrew), Mendicant University will soon have a brand new public website. Jordan (@Jordan_Byron) and I will be making some final revisions to the design Andrew created and populating the new site with content over the next week or so. We expect that if all goes well, the new site will launch within the next 7 days.
Practicing Ruby, Volume 2
I am starting to reach the point where I need to have more revenue coming in to make sure my bills get paid, but I'd rather not go back to consulting work just yet. The mendicant supporter money has helped extend my runway, but I need to augment it somehow. I've decided that it's worth a try to restart my Practicing Ruby newsletter, which was highly successful the last time I ran it. When I asked whether people would resubscribe if I started it back up, the response was overwhelmingly positive, with 25 "Hell Yeah" type comments within the first few hours, and close to 100 trickling in over the next several days.
I expect that the newsletter will officially relaunch some time in August, but for now I am working on building up a backlog of content. I've decided to release my early drafts of the articles to the Mendicant Supporter network, both as a way of saying thanks for supporting me, and also because I could use some feedback. I sent the first one of those out last night: an article that explains the differences between load(), autoload(), require(), and require_relative().
I also plan to complete the conversion of the articles from volume 1 and release them for free on the Practicing Ruby blog. The first thirteen issues are already up there, if you haven't seen them already. There are thirteen more that have not yet been released, so prepare yourself for a massive dump of free Ruby content over the next few weeks!
Software Development for Beginners (Training in New Haven, CT)
Jordan and I ran our intro session for our "Software Development for Beginners" course on July 6th. The event was a huge success, we ended up overbooking our space even though we announced the event only a week before it started. If you're interested in how it went, you can check out the course notes and code examples. Additionally, one of our students wrote a review of the session.
We will be charging for these events in the future, but we plan to aim for something akin to a dance class or yoga lesson, at $20/session. Our goal is to reach a wide cross-section of the community, and not just those who are already writing code professionally.
RubyGems Work
No new tickets have been entered for RubyGems guides, but #3 and #4 remain open if folks want to do a little bit of easy work. Right now my work on RubyGems is on the back burner because there are no urgent issues I'm aware of and I've got lots of other things to work on. What I have been doing is watching the RubyGems keyword on Twitter and watching what problems people are having. I help them where I can, but I am also making mental notes for when I do eventually get around to writing guides myself. Please let me know if you're still experiencing major problems or frustrations with RubyGems, I'll make sure that they get looked into.
Want to help RubyGems in a more substantial way? Nick Quaranto (@qrush) is looking for some folks to help maintain GemCutter. I'm too busy to do this myself, but I'd totally recommend helping Nick out, he's a great guy and GemCutter is obviously an important project.
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.
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 69 subscribers for a total of $696/mo before PayPal fees. This is not yet nearly enough to live off of, but does help offset my expenses.
RubyGems Work
A couple weeks ago I volunteered to help shore up the RubyGems documentation effort, working on the RubyGems guides in particular. However, it's been slow going because I'm so busy with many other things. I still plan to work on this eventually, hopefully finding time for writing some guides in August. Between now and then I will still review and commit their patches as they come in. The guides site is a simple jekyll static site hosted on github, so it is very easy to contribute to.
Want to help but not sure where to start? Tickets #3 and #4 only need a bit of work before I can merge something, so that's probably as good a place as any to dip your toe in.
MiniTest Helpers
With the exception of mocking frameworks, I typically don't go beyond Ruby's standard library to meet my testing needs. That means that over time I've been building up a test helper file that is gradually growing with things I find to be generally useful. As a fan of citrusbyte/contest on Test::Unit, this does something similar for MiniTest while adding a couple other features as well. To some extent it is a duplication of MiniTest::Spec, but doesn't load in the assertion syntax and has some other important difference I can't remember.
I am thinking of possibly releasing this test helper file as a gem, but not in the traditional sense. Instead, the gem would set up something like a minitest-helper script that could be used to generate a helper file locally rather than requiring these helpers directly from a library. This is the workflow I'd prefer, so that this helper just starts as a base and then gets built up as your project goes on. It will also make it so that you never need to worry about versions since you don't actually depend on my gem. If that idea interests you, please let me know and I'll get a gem out.
PuzzleNode
My main focus for the last several days has been on preparing the next batch of PuzzleNode problems. Rather than sourcing puzzles from our entire student body at Mendicant University, we're taking a more curated approach this time. I came up with the basic idea behind all four problems, and one of our instructors-in-training, Andrea Singh (@madebydna), has been helping me flesh them out. We've tried to create problems that encourage the use of object oriented programming, but they're still very much language and paradigm agnostic.
The puzzles will be released to the public on July 15th for the next Mendicant University entrance exam. My paid supporters as well as the Mendicant alumni network will get access to them some time this week to help test them and shake out any problems before they go live.
Mendicant University
We have reviewed and accepted proposals for twelve student projects to be worked on during our July core skills session. We've got some folks building games, some building developer tools, and some others even building educational programs. It's the usual mix of awesome ideas, so be sure to check out the results at the end of July and see what comes out of this session.
Andrea and I have our curriculum fleshed out for the course, we just need to prepare some writeups. We don't publicly discuss exercises in detail until the sessions are completed, but we are thinking of doing something with FFI for our integration problem, something to do with Train games for the challenge problem, and possibly a parsing problem for the academic problem. The community service project will as usual, feature a range of things that can be done to help out the school, including work on university-web, puzzlenode, and other things.
Software Development for Beginners (Training in New Haven, CT)
Jordan (@Jordan_Byron) and I launched the registration page for our "Software Development for Beginners" course intro session last week, and we'll be running the session with over 10 people tomorrow (6/6) at the SeeClickFix offices downtown New Haven. This should be exciting because it'll be the first time that I try to teach a group of raw beginners about how to write code. Andrea helped us a lot with forming some ideas for cool demonstrations we can do, so I'll be sure to report back next week with how the first session went.
Supporters Network
The Mendicant supporters network is shaping up to be interesting and useful, even if we haven't quite figured out what to do with it yet. Since the last progress report, we've traded a few emails on the mailing list doing a quick code review for one of the supporters. I also want to use it for bouncing ideas off a smaller group of folks who are supportive of my work before making public commitments. Over time, I think that this network will become something of value in of itself for those that have been making monthly contributions to me, but for now most folks there have reassured me that these semi-regular updates on my blog is enough to keep them happy. That means they're really nice people :)
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.
Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis, with no formal sponsorship or funding beyond individual contributions. I want to make this sustainable on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 70 subscribers backing me for a total of $728/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1300-$1800/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now. To remain transparent, I am doing frequent updates on what I've been working on so that folks know what their money is supporting.
RubyGems Work (Week 5)
I have been holding off on doing too much new work on RubyGems documentation because I needed to meet with Nick Quaranto (@qrush) to make sure that my plans matched with his original vision for the RubyGems guides. If you check the commit log for the guides, you'll see I pulled in a couple small fixes, but otherwise haven't made much progress on new guides. That said, I finally caught up with Nick over IRC on Wednesday, and we're on the same page, so I'll be able to do a lot more with guides in the coming weeks.
Mendicant University
Our plan for the next year of Mendicant University has been sent out out to our alumni network and the general consensus is that it's a good plan and that we'll move forward with it. I gave paid supporters an inside look at what we're planning by passing along the same video and PDF that I sent to our alumni, and that lead to some interesting discussion on the ruby-mendicant-supporters mailing list. I was excited to see some folks get involved who aren't directly involved in Mendicant University, but are supporting it through this subscription program. For those who aren't in either the Mendicant University alumni network or in the supporters network, we'll make the whole plan publicly available by July 15th.
Additionally, I just sent out the course guidelines for our July course today. That means we'll start seeing students send in project proposals soon!
Teach Me To Code podcast
I mentioned last week that I recorded a podcast with Chuck Max Wood about various things ranging from Mendicant University to RubyGems. It was released a few days ago, so check it out if you want to hear even more about what I've been working on.
Software Development for Beginners (Training in New Haven, CT)
Jordan and I will be hosting a local training here in New Haven, with our first session on July 6th. The first session will be free, and future sessions will be $20, to keep it affordable for anyone who wants to take it. The goal of this program is to take folks with no programming experience, show them what is possible, and then give them some guidance on how to get involved with programming as a hobby or possibly even a career. Stay tuned to this blog for registration information, and if you have friends or family in New Haven that you think would enjoy this sort of course, please send them our way.
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.
Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis, with no formal sponsorship or funding beyond individual contributions. I want to make this sustainable on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 69 subscribers backing me for a total of $724/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1300-$1800/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now. To remain transparent, I am doing frequent updates on what I've been working on so that folks know what their money is supporting.
I was away visiting family and trying to ward off sympthoms of burnout for a few days, but still managed to get some things done since the last progress report.
RubyGems Work (Week 4)
Things have really quieted down around RubyGems, and that means we've had a chance to catch our breath and consider priorities. Some effort is still going to be made on a compatibility layer, likely in the form of a backports gem, but the new plan is to focus on stabilizing the new APIs so that new breakage won't happen, and to help folks port old code to the new APIs as much as possible. That work is best left up to the maintainers of RubyGems, but for my part, what I can do is help with documentation. I now have commit access to RubyGems and the RubyGems guides, and will be gradually improving documentation over the next several weeks.
So far, I've only done a little: patched the README of RubyGems to fix an outdated reference to the RubyForge tracker, and triaged two requests in the rubygems/guides issue tracker. Due to my relative lack of experience with RubyGems itself, I am trying to encourage folks to contribute documentation patches themselves so that I can just help with cleanup and merging. However, I'm going to keep working on this even if I have to do the legwork myself: I think I can make an upgrade guide for end users and plugin developers that would be handy for those wanting to move to RubyGems 1.8. I have enough material from various tweets I've sent along to those trying to upgrade that I should be able to put together something useful.
Mendicant University
We are still working through our plans for the next school year of Mendicant University, which will start in September of this year. We are making a large number of small changes that should add up to a big difference in the way we do things. We still need to send our plans to our alumni network for review, but the staff has finally reached a consensus and we think we have a good plan put together. We will release the entire thing to the public within a few weeks, but for now I don't want to commit publicly to any of our plans without first getting feedback from our students.
If you're one of my paying supporters and want a bit more of an inside scoop, just ask on the supporters mailing list. These aren't secrets, I just rather not talk about work-in-progress plans in public right now. Everyone else, I apologize for how long this process has taken, we take changes to Mendicant University very seriously and are just trying hard to get it right.
Other Miscellaneous Stuff
I met with Sandi Metz on Tuesday to provide some feedback on her software design book that she's working on. She is doing some awesome stuff, and I'm really excited to be able to help her make the book even more awesome. This isn't exactly related to the Mendicant experiment, but still interesting and worth noting.
I was also a guest panelist once again for the Ruby Rogues podcast, this time around the topic was on debugging. You'll also see me on the Teach Me To Code podcast with Charles Max Wood some time next week. It was recorded yesterday, and covers various topics including Mendicant University, a retrospective on the Ruby Best Practices book I wrote a couple years ago, and my thoughts on community and open source.
Still fighting burnout
There has been so much going on in my life that I still find myself very exhausted and feeling kind of overwhelmed with everything. I think these feelings will pass once I get through all the various planning phases for my numerous projects and can buckle down and just get some work done. But for right now, I'm needing to take a few more breaks than I would like to just to remain feeling halfway productive. Please bear with me for the next few weeks, and then we should see productivity increasing once more.
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.
Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis, with no formal sponsorship or funding beyond individual contributions. I want to make this sustainable on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 68 subscribers backing me for a total of $720/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1300-$1800/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now. To remain transparent, I am doing frequent updates on what I've been working on so that folks know what their money is supporting.
This week is a bit light on the community side because I had to do a bit of commercial work to keep cash flowing, but there are still a few things worth reporting.
RubyGems Work (Week 3)
I've been busy on twitter finding people who are having problems with RubyGems and encouraging them to upgrade to 1.8.5 to see if it fixes their problems. For the most part, it has done the trick. Rails 2.3.12 was released yesterday, which fixed the compatibility issues many were experiencing. I've also been talking with Eric, Evan, and Ryan about various miscellaneous things behind the scenes, I'll be sure to report if any of the things we discussed actually materialize. The two main things I want to focus on is improving end user documentation, and on helping Evan with the compatibility layer stuff, but we're still trying to figure out what kind of work I'm best suited for.
In other news, one highly requested change was made: The RubyGems issue tracker is now on Github!
Mendicant University
Last week I mentioned that our May session was the most successful to date. Here are a couple reviews from the students who took the course: one from Vitor Pellegrino, another from Chris Geihsler.
Additionally, Jordan and I met to put together a plan for Mendicant University 2012. Our primary goal was to focus on quality rather than quantity and get together a plan that is sustainable. We are going to be putting this in front of our alumni early next week and will have something to report on by the next progress report.
GoRuCo Lightning Talk
I gave a lightning talk at GoRuCo outlining the history of the transition of PDF::Writer to Prawn, and it sort of came off as a rambling rant. Still, it's an interesting topic, and I've included the transcript of what I originally meant to say in my talk.
Monetization
After a few deep conversations with folks I really look up to at GoRuCo, it became clear to me that in order for my efforts to be sustainable, I need to stop worrying about whether I'm going to have enough money two months from now. These subscriptions help a lot with that, but they're part of the long term game, at least until they're clearing $2000/mo or more. So unfortunately, that means that I will need to spend some time on monetization which will at least partially take me away from my community work. However, I'm going to try to do that in classy ways, at least at first, so as to maximize the amount of social value of the work that I do.
Jordan (@Jordan_Byron) and I have put plans together for teaching an affordable local community course in software development for beginners here in New Haven. It'll be a six week course with the first session for free, and the five sessions to follow that one costing $100 total ($20/session). This won't come close to paying the mortgage, but might just be another trickle of revenue that's a fixed commitment and does something pretty helpful for our local community. I have to say though, the difference in pay is a bit staggering when I'm used to being able to charge $900 for a weekend at Compleat Rubyist. But the whole point of this is to make it affordable... so that's where we stand with that.
We're also still working hard on Duke Nukem Forever the book website for my Ruby Object System eBook. As soon as we get that passed through BrainTree, we can start accepting pre-orders which should help somewhat. We have a laundry list of other ideas as well if these two don't bring in enough in the near term, but in actuality I'll likely need to continue to dip into consulting here and there, which is better than nothing, but manages to be a huge distraction to me. Personally I just hope that these subscriptions continue to grow so that I can not think about these things, but that's just not practical on $700/month. That said, this money is making a HUGE difference for me, so I can't thank those who've subscribed enough.
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.
NOTE: Taking a short break to visit family
Over the next few days I'll be stepping away from the keyboard and visiting with family and generally relaxing. I should be back on top of things by Tuesday, but have felt dangerously close to burnout for the last two weeks and need to recharge the batteries.
Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis, with no formal sponsorship or funding beyond individual contributions. I want to make this sustainable on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 62 subscribers backing me for a total of $644/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1450-$1950/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now. To remain transparent, I am doing frequent updates on what I've been working on so that folks know what their money is supporting.
Mending RubyGems Fences (Week 2)
Since last week's progress report, I've been even more active on working to resolve issues surrounding RubyGems. I've been blogging things as I go, but the most significant progress so far is that we've got the team to agree to what I feel is a very reasonable release management policy. However, my efforts so far were not enough to stop the SlimGems fork of RubyGems from being released, which turned up the heat once more, but also brought some issues up that I hadn't considered before. I've decided that to be able to continue to be helpful with the RubyGems situation, I can't just rely on talking anymore, but need to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty with some code. I'm planning to get familiar with the RubyGems source code over the next week or so, in particular exploring the changes since RubyGems 1.3.7 to 1.8.5. I've also reached out to folks who have experienced breakage as a result of RubyGems upgrades, in the hopes that I can investigate what caused the problems they ran into.
Two concrete goals are on my radar as part of this expedition into the RubyGems source. The first is that I want to write some documentation about the internals and the changes that have been happening so that there is more information out there for folks to make informed decisions based on. The second is that I've been talking with Evan Phoenix about some creative ways to meet the 'backwards compatibility forever' goals of SlimGems in a less divisive way. However, both of these things depend heavily on how quickly I can front load on RubyGems knowledge, it may end up being a slow process.
Those who want to listen to an hour long discussion about this whole situation should listen to this week's Ruby Rogues podcast, I was a guest!
Mendicant University
We just wrapped up the May core skills course on Tuesday and have welcomed 10 new students into our alumni network. Our pass rate was 66%, with everyone except one student who stayed past the first week successfully completing the course. These are our best numbers ever, and that's largely thanks to the five other volunteers who helped out with the course: Shane Emmons, Steve Klabnik, Raoul Felix, Jaime Iniesta, and Justin Ramel. However, the end of the course is always the busiest part for me, because I have to review everyone's final submissions and individual projects. There were some very neat projects this time around, so I look forward to announcing them publicly within the next few days.
This week also gave way to a very significant milestone for Mendicant University, we have invited Shane Emmons to join us on staff! There is a short announcement over on our website, but we're absolutely thrilled to have Shane join us as our first teacher who is also an alumnus of our program. Shane's efforts will make it possible for us to really keep pushing things forward, and you'll be sure to see a huge impact from having him on our team within the next few months.
Last but not least, we're still in the process of selections for the July core skills session. It looks like we're going to fill up in the next couple days, nearly two weeks ahead of schedule.
There is a whole lot more going on at Mendicant University, but I'm going to need some time to catch my breath and also balance things out a bit with my RubyGems efforts. Expect to hear more next week, in particular, there should be at least a few interesting things of general value to the community by then.
Mailing List and IRC Channel for Ruby Mendicant Supporters
I have been promising for weeks now that I'd open up some communications channels for my paying supporters so that they can reach me in a more personalized setting. I have set up a mailing list and IRC channel for these purposes, and you should have received an email with info for how to access them if you're currently subscribed as a Ruby Mendicant Supporter. Please do make good use of these channels! I may be very busy over the next few days, but I would eventually like to talk with each and every person who is backing me, if only to find out what kind of things they're interested in and whether my work has been useful to them. I am not entirely sure how soon we'll have any sort of formal events such as office hours or other things like that, but we can at least start getting to know each other.
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.
Please let me know what you think of what I've been doing so far. This has been a fun few weeks and I want to keep the momentum going, but I also want to make sure that the work I'm doing is in line with what the community considers valuable.
Since December 2010, I've been working directly for the Ruby community on a full-time basis, with no formal sponsorship or funding beyond individual contributions. I want to make this sustainable on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 59 subscribers backing me for a total of $608/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1500-$2000/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now. To remain transparent, I am doing frequent updates on what I've been working on so that folks know what their money is supporting.
Mending RubyGems Fences
Since the last progress report, I've managed to throw myself into a difficult situation in the hopes of addressing some serious issues within the Ruby community. In particular, I have volunteered to act as a mediator to help defuse the intense drama that is currently surrounding the RubyGems project. I won't go into great detail in this report, because I've written extensively about it on this blog, but I can give a quick summary of what my goals are. First and foremost, I'm trying to collect some dispassonate information about the main source of tensions between the RubyGems maintainers and the community so that those on the sidelines can find out what's going on without getting sucked into the drama. Secondly, I'm trying to find areas in which compromises can be made so that folks on both sides of the fence have less reasons to be angry at each other. This approach seems to be working, though not as fast as some might hope. Lastly, I am trying to demonstrate by example that nerdrage is unproductive and harmful, and that acting civilly will not only help prevent people from getting so stressed, but also make the process of affecting positive change happen more rapidly. The results so far have been varied, but I feel the process is worth it and will be continuing on with it in the coming weeks, assuming nothing goes nuclear.
Ruby Object Model Book
Jordan (@Jordan_Byron) and I worked on building out the website for purchasing my book, because I do need some additional revenue streams coming in other than subscriptions, at least for now. But because the book is going to be released under a pay what you want model with a free option, I'll be happy to occasionally post excerpts here so that you can see what I've been up to. As a pre-requisite for prepping the book site, I needed at least a little sample content, so here are the first three micro-chapters as a PDF. At a first glance, this format might seem a bit weird to you, because it introduces classes, modules, and objects in the method lookup order rather than the way you learned OOP in school or in a Java/C++ book. It's an experiment that I think will ultimately be epic, but if you don't like the feel of it right now, wait until I have some more chapters written to express your doubts. I have what I think are good ideas for how this all will work but they're still tied up in my head.
Ruby Mendicant University
I've still been cranking away at helping our May students make it through the core skills course, but because I've been so busy with the RubyGems fiasco, I've also been leaning heavily on my assistant instructor, Shane Emmons (@semmons99) to make sure our students get the attention they deserve. When you add in our mentors and our visiting teacher Steve Klabnik (@steveklabnik), the students have had no shortage of available help and the results have paid off, this is our best retention rate in the last few days of the course ever.
In addition to the core skills course, we also have admissions open for new students who will join us in July. Four have applied already: two were accepted, and two are still pending review. Many people are attempting the PuzzleNode problemset, so that means that we'll likely see more applications soon.
Finally, as I mentioned in the last status update, we are sitting on a treasure trove of ideas from RailsConf, as well as a brand new idea that came to me last night, many of which will have direct impact on the community as a whole, not just our students. However, I've decided to wait until the end of the May session so that we can include our new alumni in the discussions. Expect news within a week!
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.
Catch you again next week! I will get a mailing list and IRC channel set up for subscribers before the end of the month, but for now, if you have questions or thoughts to share, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.
My free online school, Mendicant University, has a lot in common with a startup environment even if we're headed down the nonprofit path. In particular, we share an endless amount of interesting ideas, a lack of available time to implement them all, and a goal of reaching some level of sustainability before the money we've scrounged up runs out. The more ambitious our plans become, the more I see what a hard job it is to start something. While the title of founder is something I originally gave myself just to be a bit facetious, now that Mendicant University is starting to become a real thing, I'm having to earn that badge.
As an entirely volunteer organization, we are always limited in resources. What this means to me is that any student or staff member who has decided to lend a helping hand needs to be working on the things that will help make sure that Mendicant University will still exist a year from now. There are a thousand interesting things we could be working on, in fact, last week's RbMU summit at RailsConf probably gave us enough ideas to last us all a lifetime. But in that lifetime of work, the question remains: What can be done today that will help make sure that we will be here tomorrow?
I don't have an answer to this question just yet. But what I do have is maybe a strategy for helping to find that answer. It's something that should be familiar to object oriented programmers: Do one thing and do it well. If the single responsibility principle works so well as an organizing principle for software systems, perhaps it will work for human systems as well. I even know the one thing that Mendicant University can do well, though it's far from surprising: We're really fucking good at teaching.
Yes, it's true that now that we've been around for almost a year, we're going to need to start treating this like a real organization and not just one of my experiments. That means we'll need to think about ways to engage the public, we'll need to consider fundraising options, we'll need to continue building up our infrastructure and do all the extra behind the scenes work that any medium sized organization needs to do. But the important thing to remember, throughout this all, is that all of this serves exactly one goal: to create an environment where high quality, personalized, experience based teaching can slingshot smart and interesting people into doing awesome stuff for the world.
So no matter what it takes for us to get there, that's what we'll be doing. What is the one thing you want to do well?
I want to continue my Ruby Mendicant experiment on an ongoing basis by accepting small monthly payments from folks who want to support my community projects. At the time of writing this post, I have 55 subscribers backing me for a total of $576/mo before paypal fees. Taking in account my wife's income, I still need to come up with about $1500-$2000/month more to maintain our current lifestyle. However, the current subscribers have given me a great start, and I'm continuing on with the experiment for now.
Since the last progress report, I've primarily been running the May 2011 Core Skills Session at Ruby Mendicant University as well as attending BohConf 2011 (at RailsConf). On Tuesday 5/17 we held a mini RbMU summit with several of the alumni who were in Baltimore for the conference. A tremendous amount of progress was made in figuring out what our plans will be for the next year as Ruby Mendicant University continues to grow and change. Unfortunately, because I want to give the rest of the alumni who weren't in attendance a chance to review the ideas and plans that came up, I won't be able to talk about the details of what we went over just yet, though I promise to reveal some of them in the next progress report.
During BohConf, I spent a lot of time with prospective students who were interested in Ruby Mendicant University, helping them figure out what educational programs and resources would be best for them in their current situation. Luckily, since both Steve Klabnik (of Hackety Hack) and Andy Lindeman (of P2PU) were also in attendance, I was able to help folks who weren't quite ready for RbMU find someone who could help them. Interacting directly with a number of folks at different skill levels revealed some interesting patterns that are probably worth blogging about.
Because I spent much of the last week or so interacting with people face to face and listening to their stories, I didn't get a whole lot of hacking done, and so don't have much to share over the interwebs just yet. Here are some things you might be interested to know, nonetheless:
While the last week's efforts have mostly had to do with making progress behind the scenes, the next few weeks will surely bring plenty of publicly visible progress on my various projects. If my progress so far has convinced you that it's worth contributing $4, $8, $16, or $32 a month to help me keep working full time on community projects like these, please do subscribe below. Whether or not you're a subscriber, if you find my story interesting, I'd appreciate if you share a link back to this post on twitter or wherever else it might reach people who would appreciate it.
Catch you again next week! I will get a mailing list and IRC channel set up for subscribers before the end of the month, but for now, if you have questions or thoughts to share, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.
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
