I had some ideas that I wanted to gauge community interest on as the foundation looks avenues to champion the cause. They’re not prioritized, they’re here to serve as a starting point.
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I 'd like a curated cheat sheet of the 25(?) most common APIs and utilities. An expanded version with examples would make for some nice long-form reading, potentially to blog or book format. While this is a challenge for an individual curator/ editor, I think it’s something that the community could provide some valuable input on, perhaps as a simple poll to start.
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If the community were to focus this same kind of effort on documentation and examples into a “community wiki drive” or “documentation relay” or “24 hours of community documentation drive” or some other goofy MBA AGILE-flavored nonsense term into a measured goal for improving the wiki, I think the results could be astounding. If this is a popular idea, I will volunteer to organize it.
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I’d like to see developers or teams present their applications in a 15-30 webinar format, where they explain the business case and program, and how they solved the specific challenges presented by the client. Python has a pretty vibrant system for this sort of thing though it tends to be very wide ranging and focused on innovation. I think this system can help raise best practices across the community. This is in some ways an extension of the conference format, which I’m very much in favor of.
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I’m a fan of the local (Boston, USA) Python Meetup. It regularly has 150 attendees at a monthly Project Night with celebrity host Ned Batchelder. The idea and outcome is something short of pair programming but maybe more like pair problem solving. People come with a range of problems and don’t usually leave with a solution but often with a direction to work in. Translating this “pair problem solving” into a realizable logistical medium is pretty hard with a global base of developers. I’m open to ideas on how to solve this and people have mentioned both Wire and Gitter as potential platforms, but I haven’t used either of those personally and would like to understand how that might work.
I’ll concede that any or all these may be terrible ideas. I think this is a rare area where I can actually help. I invite comments and criticisms as well as original ideas. I will periodically summarize the ideas here if there’s a need.
Think big. Contribute a little bit often.