So today was a great day, well rather yesterday I guess. I spent a couple of hours late night with a bunch of other developers on a conf call and coding at the same time. This was a great experience coming from the somewhat disbelief of the events that are being undertaken by some of my peers. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the event is a good idea, but having too many events might become a distraction of the real goal. So I started a code jam just to see the difference.
So CodeJam’s big difference is what do you know that you want to share, and what we can do together as a collective. I think that smart people know how to work together, while not so smart people are satisfied by just talking about their individual achievements. So to avoid ending up with a group on the lather I try to come up with a more active group that could provide some insight into the coding development and learn it through the practical documentation.
Since I have a global call conference center at my disposal I tried to use it and start doing development with these couple of guys. The goal was to create at least the basic examples of the framework we were targeting.
The framework we saw was Raphael and Pyjamas. The first one was a Javascript framework for the manipulation of SVG. The second one was a python framework to generate multiple effects through HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Originally it was about Javascript but I think the current form goes beyond it and into new development of things.
We had lots of fun trying to solve the first examples and end up with a great satisfaction about being able to at least start understanding the framework. Unfortunately starting so late make us finish early as well. Not to mention that we just got to install it and configure it. I hope some of the guys stick to it and come up with something good on their own.
During the chit chat we came also with some questioning about the use of IDE, and how vim is very powerful but we need better information on how to use it. Something that I somewhat solved by finding a presentation on the use of VIM and PHP.
The next day was the Development meetup and well it wasn’t as good as I expected but eventually we got stuff out there. At least we shared some good links of projects regarding AppEngine, Javascript’s Frameworks for games and other interesting development of Google Maps. I also showed what we did the night before at the codejam meetup and well we got to talk about how to better organize ourselves. The meeting end up on a great note as we were talking about trying to pull out geeks from the university one of the baristos from the starbucks came and talk to us asking about being a student of one of the colleges I went at the beginning of the week and asking if we could contact them. Which was exactly what I did this monday. I hope that he email me so we can come down to something interesting.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 