announcementsReevaluating Code52
23 April, 2012I've been mulling over the contents of this post over the past couple of weeks - while it's been an amazing experience thus far, a few events behind the scenes have triggered some changes.
Farewells and Distractions
Last week @aeoth decided to step down from his role co-ordinating and contributing to the Code52 group. He's been a big part in many of the things we've built so far, and we wish him the best with his future endeavours.
@shiftkey will be spending his weekends living in airports as part of the Windows 8 Dev Camps around Australia over the coming weeks - plus some other things which he will talk about in the future - so he will not be as contactable as he has been previously. Once he returns from holidays in July (after dddSydney in fact) the schedule starts to look more like that of a normal person.
So with logistics getting tougher to organise each week, we want to adapt to the situation in front of us - for everyone's benefits.
Rethinking the process
So rather than continuing down this path to self-implosion, we want to try some changes to the process:
- We want to start projects when people want to build something
- We want the people involved to choose what we build
- We want to help people become contributors
- We want to ensure that everyone has fun and learns from the experience
Nothing is set in stone
Keep in mind that this is one big long experiment, and we want you to get involved.
We've got a massive backlog of ideas - if something stands out on that list that you'd like to work on, get in touch - JabbR, twitter, or email all work. If you have something else that you'd like to do that's not on the list, don't worry - just get in touch through the same channels.
With this change we are planning to drop our most radical requirement - time constraints. Up until this point, we've constrained ourselves to one week to focus on a project and get something working - which has been challenging at times.
With this change, hopefully this frees projects up to evolve at their own pace and reduces the pressure on everyone. As we've found organising this, sometimes life just gets in the way - and that shouldn't be a barrier to getting involved.
A complementary change to this is how we announce projects. Once we organise a project and a group of people to get involved, we aim to announce ahead of time (a week?) the project. This should give enough time for the group to get the groundwork in place, and give people who are following the action time to declare their interest and availability.
So what next?
@shiftkey has something he wants to kickstart - specifically this idea - but until he gets some spare time (next week at best), now is the opportunity for people to take charge and get involved - what do you want to build?
@shiftkey has a number of OSS projects on the go - getting Markpad in-app updates running, adding features to Dodo, dogfooding NSync on an internal app, reviewing pull requests and answering questions on JabbR - so I'll be hanging out in the JabbR room whenever I'm coding in my spare time.
And of course, the JabbR room also tracks conversation history - so you can drop in and see what people have been talking about previously or just hang out and chat.
This week: @shiftkey explains more
Over the course of this week, Brendan will discuss some of the philosophical goals in mind for Code52. While these are relatively simple goals, he will also discuss what we've learned so far and how we can improve things going forward.
The topics he has in mind so far:
- Always learning new things
- Push, Not Pull
- It should be fun
- Keep a balance
- Planning is a good thing(tm)
Hopefully this helps to undestand more of what's been going on behind the scenes, and gives you a better idea of the what, how and why of Code52.
We'll also keep the Show and Tell open as an ongoing thing people who want to share things they've learned or worked on - you should keep an eye on our Twitter account for announcements.
