I *swear* by code sprints and hackathons as the *best* way to become a better developer. (Well, that and having a job as a developer.)
Today I spent the day at Ian Bicking's house working on a web application called Neighbor.ly. The project is organized by Steve Clift of e-democracy.org. If you live in Minneapolis, you may have heard of this project as there are some very active local e-mail lists for the Powderhorn neighborhood (and also a new one for my neighborhood of Longfellow.)
The project is written in Python and PostGres + PostGIS (hosted on github.)
I had high aims last week of 'learning python and postgres' (ha!) - but I did manage to get postgres installed on my computer (thanks to mappstack! 1-click pretty much.)
* I learned that postgres has a 2200 page manual, has something called 'views' which are like temporary tables, and it has lots of the same stuff as mysql so it seems find. I heard it this the database snob's database. Who knew!
* Everyone was nice and no one made me feel stupid for not knowing python.
* I learned the the Python users group is the second thursday of every month. It sounds like there are not a ton of jobs in python unless you are really good at it, but people in the python users group do python for their hobby programming.
I also added the python plugin for netbeans, and downloaded 'dive into python' - which i made it like 2 pages into. But i did learn that whitespace matters in python.
Oh well, it's a start, right?
Since I had absolutely no technical knowledge to contribute (besides my continuous advocacy for making a service that will provide something that can be integrated into Drupal), I worked on design and wireframing. Which, actually, I do miss. I like design, and most of all, I prefer projects that are still in the open and planning stages, where new tools are being designed to improve our quality of life.
But I just want to share this with you, world: HACKATHONS ARE THE BEST! Maybe not all hackathons are created equal. But when there is a problem not yet solved, that effects issues like education, science, civic participation...it is a winning combination. I would live in that world if I could.
