I just want to chime in and say that it was a positive experience for me as well -- I got more pairs of eyes on what I was doing, and an opportunity to get some feedback on something that wasn't ready for publication or more formal feedback methods. Kind of like "Am I on the right track?" or "Can you see any downsides I'm not seeing?" kinds of feedback which can be invaluable as you're in the middle of a project. I would encourage more of this kind of mid-project and/or simply informal sharing. It plays well with the open source meme that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". Roy
On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 7:58 PM, Birkin James Diana <[email protected]> wrote: > (I posted this recently on g+, and a few folk pointed out that it'd make > sense to post it here.) > > The other day Ted Lawless, a fellow programmer, called me over to show me > some cool features he had added to the terrific new library search interface > he's been working on. I wanted the code4lib community to see some of this > great work, and remembered something Roy Tennant did a while ago. > > Roy had posted to g+ that he was working on something, and that he was going > to set up a g+ hangout at a specified day & time to discuss that work with > anyone interested. I and a co-worker working on similar stuff joined that > hangout with a few other people, and it was a good experience. > > I think the growth of code4libcon, and of regional code4lib unconferences, is > in part an indication that our community is loaded with passionate > programmers who love learning how others create interesting useful things. > > With that in mind, it's made me think more of us should follow in Roy's > footsteps: post a message to the c4l list about a success or investigation, > and give a date&time of a g+ hangout to talk about it and show some > under-the-hood code. This is sort of along the lines of Peter Murray's > experimental webinar-based code4lib gathering some months ago, but more > spontaneous and decentralized. Some of the 'showing' part might require a > coworker to join the hangout to aim a phone or laptop camera at a screen, but > it'd be an interesting experiment. > > --- > Birkin James Diana > Programmer, Digital Technologies > Brown University Library > [email protected] >
