I wanted to introduce my project today, but this will wait until tomorrow (well, you can go to GitHub to learn what it is about in a few words anyway). I decided to write one more “soft” (and short) post about my general opinion about the contest and my approach to it.
Since my goal is to learn something, I figure that an important opportunity for me is to read smarter people’s blogs. Today I spent half an hour or so skimming through the list of participants, and selected five blogs I’d like to follow more closely and six ones I’d like to follow, say, more or less (that is, more “socially” and less “technically”, most probably).
It is a bit too late for that today, but I decided to leave some comments on most of these blogs tomorrow (and if possible, do that on a regular basis). And I will definitely state that I do not expect those people to actually follow – not to mention comment on – my blog, but I’ll ask them to follow a few chosen contest-related blogs, even comment on them. (If they choose mine, that’s nice, but it’s not the point.) I hope to inspire some mix of healthy competition, mutual learning and teaching and other positive phenomena this way.
By the way, some of those blogs seem to be written by people even less advanced with the technologies of their choice than me with Java. That’s fine with me – even if they are not more knowledgeable than me, I can still learn from them (maybe I’ll struggle with the same problem tomorrow?), and I can also support and encourage them. The whole point of this whole contest business is (mainly) learning, right?
Also, I have to say that I like many of the project ideas a lot. In case of some of them, if they succeed, I would pay actual money for the software those people are writing. (Even though I’m a fan of free software.)
Meanwhile, I did some set-up with my own project, and I hope to start actual designing/coding within the next 48 hours at most.
Good luck to all of you, people!