Compound Thinking

TurboGears class in Ann Arbor

www.compoundthinking.com/classes/

I’m still working to get the hang of this Moodle thing, but I’ve created two classes in the above site. And I’m now ready to announce that the the “Ann Arbor — in person” class is now available for online registration. Unfortunately the room we have can only fit about 20 people so I’ll have to cap the attendance there. But for the first 20 of you the registration key is: open-278

The class will be meeting 6 times, every other Saturday, from 12 pm to 2 pm, starting January 21st.

Much of the material will also be available online, and I will be announcing an online class covering similar material later this week. Both classes are free everyone willing to provide feedback, and to have that feedback incorporated in future classes, and our forthcoming book on TurboGears.

Why teaching is important

I thought it might be important to mention why, I’m doing this. You can get some good background from Kathy Sierra’s blog: “You can’t out out spend, or out teach!”

Her post is definitely worth reading, but basically she argues that one of the keys to creating passionate users for your platform is the your ability to provide learning experiences that help people feel that they can do something significant, and cool, with your platform, and have fun doing it

What I hope to contribute to the TurboGears community is to help a thousand learning experiences bloom. Lots of that happens already on planet TurboGears, and the mailing list, and at users groups, but to the extent we can make learning TurboFears fun, gratifying, and as easy as possible, the more successful the whole platform will be.

“More Teachers/fellow-learners wanted”

So, I’m very interested in partnering with anybody else who wants to create TurboGears class content — particularly if you want to teach people how to use Identity, SQL Object, MochiKit, Flash Remoting, Linux/Windows/OS X integration, or other more advanced topics!

If we can build a community of learning around TurboGears we’ll have more long-term success for the platform and a lot more cool TurboGears based success stories to point at in the future. Since different people learn in different ways at different rates with different goals in mind, the more learning experiences we can provide the better!

Guy Kawasaki on Hiring

This afternoon I attended an on-line seminar by Guy Kawasaki, where he promoted the idea that every company ought to think of itself as a startup. In the midst of a lot of other good stuff, I found some very good hiring advice:

Hire the infected

Ignore the irrelevant

Hire better than yourself

In other words you should hire people who believe in what you do. If necessary hire somebody without the proper experience, or education — instead look only for the skills and belief that you really need. Find people with skills you don’t have, who can create things you never dreamed of. Hire people that are smarter and more interesting than you are. Lots of people talk about hiring people that are better than you, but can let go of their ego for long enough to actually do it.

TurboGears community

The TurboGears community is amazing. It’s not every project where the commiters are so concerned about catching and fixing bugs that you hear things like this:

If you’ll email me your project (ZIP or tar.gz is fine) I’ll take a look.

Jeff, Kevin, Ronald, David, and the rest of the TurboGears team are building a great community. And I’m convinced that community building is one of the three most important pieces to creating a successful open source based development project.

Oh, the other two pieces are:

1. creating a project which is genuinely useful
2. help your users learn to do something they think is cool

For Open Source projects both building a quality product, and teaching your users, are significantly amplified by community involvement. Community members build cool things, extend the base, and they create the best fellow-learners/teachers.

And this is not just an academic exercise — open source leaders and projects have lost their technical advantage because their leaders were not able to build and maintain strong positive communities. At the moment Arch, and it’s successor TLA, provide a prime example, especially when contrasted with subversion and Bazzar-NG.