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Gregory Parkhurst - Mendicant University |
Mendicant University (formerly Ruby Mendicant University) invited me to their alumni network after completing their intense and rewarding Core Skills course in September 2011.
This is not your usual academic course. For one thing, it's both free as in "free beer" and directed hands-on by Gregory Brown, a guy who really knows his stuff, along with a small staff and former students who act as mentors.
For another, it's not primarily about book learning: It's about helping a small group of intermediate-level Ruby programmers through the process of leveraging the open-source collaboration model to navigate deliberately vague requirements and tight deadlines in order to ship working code, while simultaneously instilling a sense of community.
Each student works on several projects simultaneously during the course. One is an open-ended personal project. You're required to pitch it, meet your own requirements, and hit the quality checkpoints on time. I worked on a PDF reformatting tool which guesses new margins based on the position of content, created a cooperative turn-based console game, and implemented a digital logic simulation tool. There's also a requirement to submit a pull request on someone else's project; I experimented with integrating RedCarpet into one of Greg Brown's side projects.
If that sounds like a lot to cover in three weeks, I can assure you it is. And very much worthwhile. :)
Since then I've been focused on finding ways to pay it forward. I made my first contribution to Ruby's core documentation, and have been ramping up my collaboration skills with other Mendicant community projects, including their their IRC bot and their puzzle/admissions site PuzzleNode, which recently received a shoutout from @JEG2 and PragDave. I've also started working with Mission of Mercy, a project started by Jordan Byron to provide management software for free dental clinics, and expect to dig into their RubyFlow-inspired community site as soon as it's open to collaborators.