Thursday, May 31, 2007

Summer of Code as a Learning Experience

As I watched Summer of Code students discussing their projects on the IRC channel, something occurred to me: while SoC is a fantastic learning experience, there isn't much student-to-student learning. Student coders can learn from their projects, mentors, books, Google, etc, but not as much from each other.

I'd love to see more explanation of what other students are doing. Many of the students are light years ahead of me in terms of coding abilities, and I think there's a lot I could learn from them. There are so many projects working with concepts I don't understand and I would like to.

People seem to be blogging a lot more this year than they did last year, and that's awesome. The Planet SoC feed seems to be busier this year as well. We should use this increase in blog popularity to teach each other about what we're doing. Not just saying what our project deals with, but taking the time to explain concepts and maybe even mini tutorials - teaching in general.

Anyone else with me?

2 comments:

Sashikanth said...

I really like the idea of having a blog as a developer notebook. Scribbles, notes, irritating issues that you overcame while fresh on chai :)
This is a first for me. But the idea's worth a shot

Unknown said...

I fully agree with you. I have tried doing something similar, but without any success. I have been talking a little about technical changes and uploading some patches where my changes are shown. Nothing more.

Maybe the main reason why I haven't talked more about, is that I'm afraid about my knowledge not being the expected level. Blogging is time consuming too, and expressing my technical knowledge isn't my specialty neither. But I will give it a try.