This seems cool, as far as I can tell it's more for one's personal education, rather than producing something for others to use?
So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?
E.g., an open-source iTunes integrated with bittorrent, complete with iPhone app. A font-design program for amateurs. A keyframed animation tool that outputs to HTML5 canvas. A dynamic texture generator program. A user-friendly neural net trainer. A new lossy image compression format and encoder/decoder designed for resolution independence instead of a fixed pixel grid. I don't know, just cool projects that get people really excited.
I mean, the logistics of organizing such a thing would be a little crazy, since not every type of project is amenable to a large number of developers working in parallel, and you'd need a kind of domain expert and lead architect on each one. But it would be so, so cool...
That's exactly what Assembly does (https://assemblymade.com/ideas). We enable everyone to openly collaborate on real products and then share the upside. Every month there is revenue Assembly transparently pays the bills and splits the remaining proceeds with everyone that built the app.
I've gone through the site, and am curious about your business model. Essentially, you are creating co-op apps: how much of a cut of that app goes to the assembly team? Is it 50%, with you taking control of selling the app/making the business decisions? Or is the stake constantly changing (i.e. I contributed early, but my share gets diluted as more people work on more tasks to continue making revenue?), and you at some point want to sell the app?
well this just popped across my desk... nice. pretty similar to our Geeklist hackathon/projects/ideas app rolling out of our hackathon app at (http://geekli.st/hackathon) only it is all free. we don't take any cut. we provide all the infrastructure. Apps that get built that gain traction our Geeklist Labs will help get funded - if they want. No contracts, no fees for the app. 100% open source collaboration for ideas and projects. Spurring innovation globally at Geeklist. disclosure: I founded Geeklist. - r - oh and hack4good (http://hack4good.geekli.st)
> So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?
There was something posted on here a while back called AssemblyMade. They basically do crowd-sourced development. To my knowledge, ideas are voted on, and then people essentially work in a democratic environment iterating on the development. In the end, the idea is that any profits made from the project will be split.
It really would be. I was hoping that this "coding club" would do something like what you described, but it seems to be more of a pay-for-learning approach.
It doesn't seem wildly successful, but it's a nice effort, and I heard about it via a computer science student who found it interesting to participate in.
Neat, but I would prefer something similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. A self-support group for people who already have personal projects, want to work on them, but are either lazy or procrastinating or paralyzed by analysis.
Although I would probably not pay money for either.
This is exactly what we had going on with our CS reading group in LA - csrg.org
It worked a little too well, all of us got new and better jobs, and we're no longer close enough geographically to continue at the same rate as before.
I had the exact same need, so I started a group with some coworkers to provide encouragement. As people shifted jobs membership has expanded to include people at several companies. We get together every other Tuesday and hack on projects, drink beer and network.
We have this in London - at least for JVM devs. It's sponsored by Salesforce, so free as in you get free breakfast and lunch and incredible views (26th floor) over London. I went for the first time this month and I'm definitely going back in Feb! http://hackthetower.co.uk/
IMO ... a psychiatrist. If you really have that much trouble starting a personal project then you either need to fix yourself or have someone help you fix yourself.
sorry for bluntness, haven't had enough coffee or sleep.
So I get to pay you $30/m to work for you on projects and I get to talk to the other developers you have locked up in your forum and to listen to you do a screencast of unverifiable quality. Sounds amazing, sign me up!
My question too. Given that I can get a list of open source projects that I can work on for free with GitHub Explore[1] I am wondering what this provides me that is worth any money, not specifically $30. To take it one step further, why should I pay you for a list of free projects, when I can get paid to work on projects with other sites like Rent A Coder[2]? The list of features implies that I will effectively only get screencasts that I don't get from github repositories and depending on your language there are lots of places to get those too (ex [3]).
Don't get me wrong, I am all for monetizing, but I greedily want something if I am going to pay for it.
I'm guessing that Marc will try to curate the projects so that you learn a lot in as little time as possible. You could work on rent a coder instead but presumably on that site, most projects will be web based CRUD apps whereas I'm imagining that these projects will help you grow as a developer.
Odds are the starting code wouldn't be written in a language I would want to use for a side project (I'm picky about side projects since they're for fun after all). I guess I could start from scratch with the starting code as a reference, but then I wouldn't be as connect to the community who are all using different technologies.
Will the club be focused on web development? You're saying that the presentations will be in JavaScript but that the projects can be done in any language. Since some kinds of projects cannot be done in JS and some can only be done in JS, this seems to be somewhat restrictive.
I have ideas for the first few projects. I'll try to have very diverse ones.
This is not 100% decided atm, but the first project will probably be to implement a HTML5 Canvas game. I'll show how to implement a game loop in JS, but also in other languages. Then, drawing on an HTML canvas or something else is very much alike.
Another project I have in mind is to implement a small compiler/transpiler. Re-implement some UNIX utilities. Perhaps a web framework too...
But I want this to be guided by the community. I'm thinking of having a voting system to let members decided what will be the next project.
It's for experienced developers who want to code on cool projects on the side.
I will be producing screencasts, articles and supporting ppl in the club. I think there's a value to this. Teaching other developers online is what I do for a living.
I don't really get it either. As an experienced developer if I want to work on a cool project I either start my own or I go on github and contribute to something I'm interested in. While the creator claims to be recruiting experienced developer's I don't see why any good developer would pay a monthly fee to work on a side project. This seems like it would attract more amateur or novice programmers who aren't comfortable contributing to a large mature project on github.
I agree, but i find this suitable for me. because whenever i try to contribute to a project on github, i spend an awful lot of time in browsing all the projects in my language of choice and end up not contributing to any of them. If there are less choices involved, its better, and since he is curating the content, it would involve less of those hassles.
Sort of... but in the bar I'd be there teaching music, how to compose a song and helping you find people to practice and perhaps create your own songs.
Everyone will be working the same project, for eg. a game. I will present the basics of creating a game, give code to get started, etc.
Think of it as a RailsCast/PeepCode but centered around a community.
A little off-topic, but it makes me a little sad that the exemplar my_great_project it mentions is in JavaScript.
It's not because of the language itself. It's because it's implied that the platform my_great_project would be built on is "Chrome, the new C runtime". This is the "platform of the future" and that makes me kinda sad.
Not at all. But I'm assuming some knowledge of web development.
For example, one project will be to code an HTML5 game, but you can choose to implement it in C or Java. You'll need to be able to understand JavaScript/HTML to learn from the screencasts that will present the project since I will be using JS and HTML5 canvas.
That's just an example, another project idea I have atm is implementing language or compiler.
It's not because of the language itself. It's because it's implied that the platform my_great_project would be built on is "Chrome, the new C runtime". This is the "platform of the future" and that makes me kinda sad.
It's not that I'm attached to C and C++. It's that I think the Web as a development platform is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine, and I think we as a community of programmers could probably do a whole lot better.
It's not about what's better or worse. It's about where the audience is. The web absolutely nailed reach, but if you're fine with forfeiting that, you're still free to build with whatever you fancy.
Are the lower layers really any less Goldbergian though? I would bet that everything from the physical hardware on up is laden with path dependencies, workarounds, and efficiency vs portability tradeoffs.
There's more to goodness than technical aesthetics -- ubiquity is important and arguably harder to achieve.
Is this more of a curated program where I am assigned a project to work on and given support towards doing so, or is this a community where people come in with projects and the community works collaboratively towards supporting these projects?
It will start as a curated program. But my hope is to make it evolve to be both. A place to get knowledge, inspiration and motivation. And then a place to get help and support making your own thing when you're ready.
I think then that the name is a little disingenuous. "Club" connotes a community, but not a directed program of study with a supervising teacher. The first half of the website, everything up until "Learning for all types of learners," describes an awesome community idea. Your product screenshot is a re-skinned Discourse forum.
But you swerve into this sort-of class format so we can "build our resumes" to be like Twitter employees, and you're looking for $30/mo for it? This seems like less collaborative community, and more a carefully branded training course from http://classes.codedinc.com/.
Not at all what I had in mind. I want this to be a community and not a course.
But to get there we have to start somewhere. And I know people can bond and form a community better if they work on similar problems, thus the projects.
Thanks for the reply. For my part I could be really interested in a walled garden community format (i.e. I get the charging part as long as you use the funds to provide value back to the community), but am less interested in curated projects.
In any case, I've jot it down on my "follow up" list for when I have some more free time. Good luck!
Nice idea. I don't have the time to do this right now as I'm already working on a few side projects but I'll definitely be checking back in a few months. Not too sure $30 is the right price. $20/25 feels better to me (small difference I know but $30 just 'feels' a little high).
I know Marc-André and can vouch for the quality of his instruction and his creative, effective class formats. This is a very cheap way to learn a lot from him, and I highly recommend it.
I never have any problems starting something new. I have problems finishing what I start. When I start a new project I do the hard parts first for a proof of concept. Except now that I know it can be done I loose interest...
This looks really great. I have enough knowledge from school and online courses that I really dont need to take another curated tutorial.
We havent started development on my main project at work and I am itching to use my new skills. Recently I have been looking for something to collaborate on with more experienced devs but havent found an outlet. This looks like something I was looking for.
@macournoyer, reading the comments here, it sounds like your value proposition isn't articulated clearly enough. There's a bunch of mentions of the price and not knowing what they are getting.
In your comments here, you mention the importance of your instruction and teaching, which I think is great. Perhaps make that clearer on the website?
I really appreciate this idea and have signed up, but the $30 monthly tag seems a bit much with the amount of information given.
This could really benefit from a trial period, or maybe a demo project. A demo project would be neat; have it offer everything the other monthly projects will so people know exactly what they are getting into.
Damnit! Just disabled GA tracking. Thanks for spotting that.
There will be a monthly fee to join. I'll try to make it clearer on the page, sorry about that. This is my business, I make a living teaching developers online.
So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?
E.g., an open-source iTunes integrated with bittorrent, complete with iPhone app. A font-design program for amateurs. A keyframed animation tool that outputs to HTML5 canvas. A dynamic texture generator program. A user-friendly neural net trainer. A new lossy image compression format and encoder/decoder designed for resolution independence instead of a fixed pixel grid. I don't know, just cool projects that get people really excited.
I mean, the logistics of organizing such a thing would be a little crazy, since not every type of project is amenable to a large number of developers working in parallel, and you'd need a kind of domain expert and lead architect on each one. But it would be so, so cool...