Geeks talking about cool stuff

As many of you know, I often play around with projects and ask people for their feedback. Recently I have been finishing up work on the Git In The Trenches book, which has taken me almost a year to complete. Usually, as a project nears its completion, I ask various friends and colleagues to check it out and give me their feedback. During GITT, I took a different approach of developing the book in public. It was fantastic and resulted in much greater community participation than I had originally envisaged.

The problem with this approach was that getting feedback on the project was more difficult. Either people were;

• Long time friends of mine, in which case though I trust them to be honest, an outsiders opinion would give me something different.
• Not interested in Git because, being a technical book, it has a far narrower audience than a fiction book.
• Intimately involved in the project, in which case they are going to be biased towards it.

To overcome these issues, I decided to find someone in the open source community that used Git extensively and who has also been known to give rather good advice in the past. During the development of the book, I began listening to “The Changelog“, a podcast all about open source, and in particular the web and ruby. It’s a fairly well known fact that many Ruby developers use Git. I decided to send the book to Wynn Netherland, co host of “The Changelog” to see what he thought about it.

I could not have hoped for more useful feedback. I had been focusing the book towards a very specific subset of the Git community and I was exceedingly glad when Wynn summed up his thoughts on who the book would be geared towards.

Corp devs who cling to non-distributed source control and designer-y type folks that are intimidated by SCM (probably scared off from SVN)

Which was my exact target audience. Though the book is easily readable by anyone, the format of the book takes you through, week by week, as Tamagoyaki Inc. decide to implement Git in their workplace.

Another comment was pretty interested too.

I like the writing style. I think it makes a technical topic approachable. What i found difficult was scanning.

Wynn is exactly right. In my efforts to make the book kinda quirky and approachable, I used pun-like headings to each chapter section. Whilst this worked well for someone reading the book cover to cover, it made the book very difficult to navigate if you wanted to dip in and find out information on a specific subject. I do currently have an index and was pleased to see that it had been implemented well.

…but your index is solid

So, my major change to the book will be to include kind of dip-in guide, so that people can just jump to a chapter to get information on a particular topic. Wynn seemed to like the list of topics on the back and the idea of using that as a base for the dip-in index was well received.

I have to say I am pretty pleased with the end result.

…all in all, superb job.

So just a few more tweaks here and there and I’ll be ready to release this baby to the masses. A bit thank you to everyone who has helped out with the book so far and an extra big thank you to Wynn for taking the time out of a very busy schedule to look over the book and offer me suggestions.

Checkout the GITT site now to begin learning Git. The site is still in Beta, but we’d love to get your feedback 🙂

So, a good friend of mine decided to do a robotics project. Not content with _just_ doing a robotics project Paul decided to make things pretty damn complex for himself. The task, as outlined on his blog, is to make a complete, 4 legged, walking robot from scratch in under 24 hours.

I thought the project was pretty damn impressive from the outset, but then I saw more information about how Paul was planning to implement the legs. Not just simple zero joint legs, oh no! That would be far too simple. These leg joints are going to allow the little beast to walk like either a mammal or an insect, depending on how the servos are set up. Highly impressive!

I have to say this is going to be absolutely awesome, especially as all the programming and controlling is going to be carried out using a little Arduino board, not dissimilar from the one I posted up a few weeks ago. Right now Paul is having a few 3D printer issues, that’s right folks, he’s even printing all the parts himself, so why not head on over to his blog and give him a little more encouragement.

Thanks to my very good friend, and contributor to GeekDeck, Og Maciel, GITT is starting to gain a little traction. Og wrote a post about the GITT project a few days ago, and since then, there has been a flurry of activity. I have to say a huge thank you to ali1234 and themiwi for forking GITT on github and fixing some spelling mistakes and typos. I’d also like to thank all the people who have started to watch the project on github too. If you want to check it out, just go here https://github.com/cbx33/gitt

I’m really excited for the future of the project and almost everyone who has read the premise of the book has commented that it sounds like a very good way to present the material. I know that a few people who have read a little further into the book itself have liked the style.

We still have a long way to go and have to explain some pretty complicated topics, but I’m confident that with Git users behind me, we’ll win through.

Thanks to all who have contributed so far

So – I’ve started putting the new book up on GitHub in case anyone feels the need to comment/fork and or generally help out. I’d like to thank both benc and mjj29 for their help in getting my started in LaTeX.

https://github.com/cbx33/gitt