Introducing code52

31 December, 2011

This all started with a simple premise:

"A new coding project every week"

Madness! I was hooked and gobsmacked at the same time. I had so many questions, and as we discussed it we started to come to something resembling an agreement.

Who's behind this idea?

We are (in alphabetical order) Andrew Tobin, Brendan Forster and Paul Jenkins.

What are your goals?

We want to:

introduce developers to open-source projects and help them learn the ropes.
foster a community which encouraged contributions across a range of technologies.
work on projects which the community (i.e. YOU) want to improve.

Of course, that doesn't get away from the original question I had.

Why a week?

A week isn't a long time - or it may be, depending on your perspective. This is still a somewhat contentious point within the group, but a week suits me because:

shorter timelines encourage achievable goals.
shorter timelines reduce the incentive to procrastinate.
more variety of projects to work on over a period of time.
with good organisation, each week should be productive out of the gate.

What next?

But there are some things we need to address first:

how do we determine which projects to work on?
how do we organise each project?
how do we (as co-ordinators) deal with the skill gap between experienced and junior developers?

We want to build fun stuff, give back to the projects which have been useful to us, and potentially create a community around this crazy idea. So whatever your background - if you want to get involved and work with others in the developer community, we'd love to hear from you.

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