Compound Thinking

Learn Web 2.0 Development with TurboGears

I’ve been swamped lately, starting a new company and a new job, and a couple new book projects.

But I really want to start running some online classes again.

I’d like to help people who are facing the learning curve of Web 2.0. Perhaps you’ve done some basic web stuff, but the thought of HTML+CSS+JavaScript+ServerFramework seems like it’s too much to learn on your own. My theory is that it’s better to learn in groups, so what I hope to do is organize some online classes which bring together groups of people who are interested in helping each other learn all this web 2.0 stuff.

I have some basic materials from the PyCon 2007 tutorials on TurboGears, which should supliment the book to provide plenty of material for the server side stuff. And we can use some existing resources for the HTML, CSS and JavaScript stuff.

I’d also be interested in doing a local class in the South East Michigan area on a couple successive Saturdays — but I need a good location, so if you’re in the area, and want to help make this happen drop me an e-mail at (mark at compound thinking dot com).

I’m still getting getting the website setup for all of this, and how I’ll be able to manage the bandwidth requirements of the class. An the class will be “free,” except that I’m going to ask people to pledge to volunteer some time on either a local charity, or working on some open source project.

This will be a learning experience for me too, so if you’ve done something like this before, feel free to e-mail me with whatever tips you might have (mark dot ramm at gmail dot com).

And if you’re interested in taking the class, watch hear for final details sometime next week.

Bar Camp Ann Arbor Mailing List

It looks like there are a few other people interested in bringing the Bar Camp idea to Ann Arbor that we ought to be able to make it happen this summer. If you want to find out details as soon as possible, please feel free to sign up for the Bar Camp Ann Arbor google group, or keep checking back here.

Of course, we’ll be hosting this in Ann Arbor, but we hope it will be a larger regional event. And if you’re interested in helping, feel free to email me (mark dot ramm at gmail dot com) and I’ll get you hooked up with the rest of the interested parties, and we can start rockin’.

Bar Camp Ann Arbor?

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting together a Bar Camp later this summer. I’ve got a potential venue, and some interested people. But I’m looking for some feedback, and some people who might be willing to help with some of the organizational details.

If you’re interested, or want to help out, drop me a comment or e-mail me at mark at compound thinking.com

TurboGears Doc Sprint

I’ll be hosting a TurboGeard Documentation Sprint this coming Saturday, January 13th, right before the TurboGears Jam.

Having a book is good for TurboGears, but we couldn’t cover everything in the book, and not everybody wants or can afford dead-tree documentation, so it’s also important that we create great online docs!

Date: Saturday, 13th January 2007
Location: Ann Arbor, MI, United States (remote participation encouraged!)

We’ll discuss our work on the TurboGears Docs mailing list, on IRC channel #turbogears on freenode, and organize our efforts around the tasks listed below.

Things to work on:

• Widgets Documentation
• Updated “Big Picture” Diagram
• Creating Diagrams to go with various doc pages
• Complete migration of pages from the old trac wiki to this wiki
• Updating DocStrings in the TG code
• Workign on automated API Doc generation
• Creating a script to generate flat HTML versions of the Docs for offine use

There will be work for everybody, at every skill level. We need people to copy over the text from the trac wiki and convert it into ReStructured text, and we need people to update the DocStrings in the TurboGears code. If you don’t want to write docs, but feel comfortable hacking up some code, we need help generating API docs, and we need to create flat HTML files so you can browse the docs offline.

So, if you have a few hours and want to help TurboGears have great Documentation, please pitch in and give us a hand. It will make all the difference in the world for somebody just getting started!

Code Mash

Some friends of mine are putting together a non-denominational developers conference called code-mash in Ohio this January.

Looks like Python and Ruby are both going to have a good number of talks. I’ll be talking about SQLAlchemy, which is the best object relational mapper I’ve ever seen. There’ll be talks about Test Driven Development in Python, Enterprise Architectural Patterns for Python developers, along with lots of cool talks about Lean Software Development, the side benefits of Test Driven development.

You can still submit a talk proposal before November 30th, and you’ll get free room and board. I think it would be great to see somebody talk about Dabo and Desktop application Development in Python, and they seem to be missing any talk about OSX/Cocoa stuff, which I’m sure is because they haven’t had any proposals yet.

It would also be nice to see a good cross platform development with Mono talk…

I’m really excited by the opportunity to get developers of all kinds together and talk about how to be productive and learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools/frameworks people are using.