Hello everyone! Just dropping by to make three announcements of upcoming events and projects here on the network over the summer:
1. Fishbowl on Saturday, May 28
Our next fishbowl conversation will be happening on the Discord on May 28! If you've never joined us, a fishbowl is essentially a panel conversation held over text chat, where a select few participants can hold a focused long-form discussion on a specific topic. We're a big fan of this format because of the way it allows participants to write thoughtful, long-form answers that would be impossible in any other medium.
We've had fishbowls on the future of operating systems in the age of the Internet, the relationship between simplicity and performance, "configuration" and how to avoid it, and many other topics. This time we are excited to tackle a subject near and dear to all our hearts: object-oriented programming.
We hope for this to be the definitive community conversation about OOP, since it's such a frequent topic of conversation and such a confusing issue to discuss. If you'd like a preview of the topic or would like to contribute thoughts or resources, please check out the planning discussion over on GitHub.
The fishbowl will be held in the #fishbowl channel on Discord at noon CDT. To see the time in your local timezone, and be notified when the fishbowl starts, bookmark this whenisit page!
2. Jam in August
We've held two jams as a community in the past, and they have both been smashing successes. In particular, last year's Wheel Reinvention Jam produced tons of great projects and introduced us to lots of amazing community members. Naturally, we're going to do another jam this year!
We are still working out all the details, so a proper announcement and final dates are yet to come. But we will confirm that this year's jam is happening in August! Expect it to follow a similar format to prior years—so, one week, and working in teams is allowed and encouraged.
More soon. 🙂
3. A new education initiative
This project is still in its early stages, but too exciting not to tease. Spearheaded by long-standing community member cloin, we are hard at work behind the scenes on a new kind of education initiative for programmers. This new initiative will subsume and replace the old library, which we know many people sorely miss, and will also hopefully live up to the dream of the old wiki and old education initiative.
We are very excited to share more about this project with you in the coming months. For now, if you're interested, nag us on Discord and maybe we'll drop a few more hints. 😉
A call for volunteers!
These are just a few of the projects we have in the works for the coming year, and there is even more we'd like to be doing. We'd love to get more people involved in the following:
- Helping maintain the website and build new features for the community
- Developing and organizing starter projects for people to use (particularly for the jam)
- Beta testing new initiatives
If you're interested in any of these, please reply to this post or hit us up on Discord!