

Announcing the Hacker School Maintainers Program - davidbalbert
https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/23-announcing-the-hacker-school-maintainers-program

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danso
What a fantastic idea. The problem with bright new coders, particularly ones
who come from rigorous but relatively-short learn-to-code curriculums, is that
they haven't been exposed to enough best practices. It's easy to create a
beautiful site that mashes two APIs in an amusing way...but creating something
that can be used and modified and _relied_ upon requires a new level of skill
at abstraction and (logistical) design...and what better way to drill the
concepts of decoupling and orhthogonality than to practice jumping into a 10K
LOC code base and identify the modules and snippets that _you_ can fix?

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rekwah
"Hacker School would be far worse if it didn't take place in person.
Friendship, comfort and trust, all of which are necessary for effective
learning, are more easily built in person than online."

I'm curious if this is more a consequence of the medium (internet/phone) and
its lack of tools or this specific goal (developing software). I would imagine
that it is easier to build a friendship through, say, playing World of
Warcraft together than pair programming. Perhaps this is because software
development tends to be a more solitary activity and we're slower to accept
others in it.

~~~
davidbalbert
I probably could have elaborated a bit on this point in the blog post, but I
wanted to keep it short. It's a good question though, and it's worth
answering.

One of the surprising things we've learned while running Hacker School is the
extent to which your comfort level dictates how much you will learn. To learn
effectively, you need to be able to ask questions without worrying about
looking stupid, you need to be able to admit when you don't know something,
and you need to be able to jump into things that are over your head and know
that you'll be able to figure them out as you go. Your ability to do all of
these things is related to how comfortable you are with your environment and
the people in it.

When I wrote about the situations where people build friendship, comfort and
trust, I wasn't thinking about pairing sessions (though it can happen there).
I was thinking about all the other things you end up doing when you're in the
same place with a bunch of people for an extended period of time. Comfort gets
built during group lunches, on the weekends, at movies, concerts, in the park,
at bars, the beach, etc. Hopefully this clears things up a bit.

EDIT: "talking" -> "thinking" in the second paragraph.

~~~
rekwah
Good blog post and thanks for the response.

I just touched on the development aspect I found interesting, but I understood
the underlying intent: the "other" things. I agree about group lunch being
very important for developers working together as one. I've experienced both
sides of the coin and there is a discernible difference in
relationships/familiarity between the two. I'm curious if this group setting
can ever be replicated virtually. I don't think Soylent IV & Skype will do the
trick. :)

I'd love to see a postmortem blog post after the next class from both students
and maintainers and what did and didn't work with the virtual program.

~~~
davidbalbert
_I 'd love to see a postmortem blog post after the next class from both
students and maintainers and what did and didn't work with the virtual
program._

I'd very much like to do this.

