Cullen’s blog post about learning Ruby on Rails yesterday inspired me to write about what’s going on and also to make it a point to document things more and more (and not just photo-wise on Radar).
I’ve been meaning to learn a new programming language and made the decision that it would be Rails a while ago. For me, it’s always easier to learn things when you have 1) a group of people to do it with and 2) when there’s a tangible event you can attend (the Austin on Rails boot-camp in a couple of weeks). I was excited when a few people showed interest in learning it together.
As a designer, I’m looking forward to the chance to get to peek under the tent since normally the furthest I get to anything close to code is the XHTML/CSS of a site. It will be interesting to see my progress since this is the first true programming language I’ll be learning. I feel it will make me a better designer in the long run since I’ll have a better grasp of what a programmer has to go through. Not only will I get to better empathize with him/her, but I’ll have a strong foundation as to what is possible when we’re developing a site together. At the end of it I may not be a Rails expert, but I’m willing to learn all that I can to make me a better part of the web development process.
A discussion came up last Friday at Jelly between Cullen, Dusty, Seth and I to see if we could figure out a way to share knowledge between each others’ disciplines. Naturally, a new project stemmed from this, something we’re calling Half Hour Hacks. The premise is, stand up in front of a group of us and teach me something unrelated to my field in 30 minutes or less; it’s a way developers, designers and everyone in between can learn from each other.
The site is live, but there’s no content on it yet; more on this as it develops in the next few days. I feel only good things can come from creating more and more ways for the Austin tech community to come together, mingle and cross-pollinate ideas. It’s time for us to start producing some cool stuff. I’m ready!
Tags: Startups · Technology5 Comments
5 responses so far ↓
The Half Hour Hacks site looks great! We should do our first HHH soon. Maybe we should just bust out in the middle of Jelly some Friday. Jelly + HHH. Do it around lunch time, off to the side. Folks could stop what they were doing for lunch and learn something new.
I never saw you post this comment. I think you’re right, we need to get the first one of these off the ground, asap. Let’s all talk this week about doing it!
I’d definitely be interested in presenting a HHH.
I’m assuming you’d be opening it to anyone with a good presentation.
I was thinking about something like this when I was at Jelly last Friday. I was waiting for someone to gather everyones attention and present something.
It’s a great idea.
I love the idea of Half Hour Hacks!
Here in Seattle we have a group called Saturday House that rents an office space to collectively show up on Saturday and work/hang out/bounce ideas off one another. We often have mini events on Saturdays where we share laundry hacks, or Apache config files, or anything else someone wants to share.
I also haven’t learned a “real” programming language yet and have been thinking about digging my teeth into Rails. If you find any good resources, would you post them? I’m keeping a running list here: http://del.icio.us/MSMPeaches/ruby
oh yeah! looks killer dude