I’m bored. Let’s do something. You and me. Let’s make something fun and educational. Something you’re proud of and enjoyed being a part of.

What on Earth am I talking about?!

For example:

Code52

I really liked the Code52 idea, but that succumbed to everyone involved being human and not able to actually commit to a new coding project every single week for a whole year. Very very ambitious.

What amazing things came out of code52?

• some really wonderful pieces of open source software (Markpad, one of the first, got me into Markdown which resulted in my sublimemarkpress sublimetext plugin)
• explained concepts such as OSS and git (or github) in a very easy to understand and welcoming way; if this didn’t get you to fork a repo and learn git, nothing will
• got people enthusiastic about collaborating on interesting and small projects; big projects are hard to commit time to and hard to join later on

I applaud their efforts and the fact that they couldn’t commit to literally 52 projects in one year in no way detracts from their achievements. Bravo, code52, bravo.

7DFPS

What about the 7 Day FPS challenge? Create a first person shooter in 7 days!

Sub Rosa is a fantastic (if extremely blocky) multiplayer game, with a pretty complex city to wander around and an actual 3 team “plot” (get item – from team 1 – into briefcase – held by team 2. Team 3 must stop them. Or something)

The Plan

Why don’t we start something like that? Something a bit educational and for future reference; the sort of thing you can point your new junior developer to when they have a few spare minutes to help build their skillz up, but nothing too taxing for the contributors

Potential projects

Year of GoF

How about a project for example/reference implementations of the Gang of Four Design Pattern in various languages; one a month for all of 2013 (and almost all of 2014, if you like).

For example, January could be Strategy Month, February is Observer Month. Contributers submit example implementations in a language of their choice, and the we try to document the best in each language. The examples should all be hosted on github/codeplex

Kinect 2013

Got a Kinect for Windows? What stuff can we make with it, one a month?

RaspberryPi’13

RaspberryPi’s – what are they good for? Let’s find out. 12 projects over 2013.

Anyone fancy it? Any suggestions?