
Nerdery - IsaacSchlueter
http://foohack.com/2008/12/nerdery/
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petercooper

      Hacking on your own can be fun, but no matter what it is, 
      projects really take the fuck off when a few heads are 
      working together. That’s how you get explosive momentum. No 
      matter how smart or driven you are, you cannot do it alone.
    

Groups help give explosive momentum, sure, but when it comes to _starting_
projects or making bold developments, nah. I'm thinking of the precendents set
with, say, Linus Torvalds and Linux, Matz and Ruby, or DHH and Rails. It takes
the dictatorial "I'm making all the decisions and getting this to the next
step" approach to really get a project going. Big shifts require hunkering
down too - when Parrot and Perl 6 started, there were so few people involved,
but they really kicked it off.

Of course, the open source world has proven that once you reach a point where
you have something useful and not too experimental, it can only improve under
the influence of others :)

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Absolutely.

When I say that they take off in the presence of multiple people, I'm not just
referring to multiple decision-makers or coders. Sometimes just hearing "Wow,
I'd like to use that, when will it be ready?" is enough to push something over
the brink from "forgotten idea" to "working prototype".

------
stcredzero
"Get thee to the Nerdery!"

The idea is more of whimsical as opposed to intellectual interest.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Oh? I've found that a healthy nerdery is a key component to getting much of
anything interesting done. For people who are so often socially stupid, and
yet involved in business, which is so socially dependent, I'd think that the
development of good nerderies would be a fairly relevant topic.

Maybe I'm just more socially stupid than the average nerd, so this stuff seems
less obvious to me.

