Updates @ Mendicant University

Shutting Down Mendicant's Tech

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

This is a repost of Jordan Byron’s reflection on sunsetting Mendicant’s technical infrastructure

A week ago today I sent an email the the Mendicant disucssion list announcing my plans to sunset the organization’s aging technical infrastructure. Many of the resources earmarked to be closed (university-web, community, anita, mendibot) had not been active for close to a year. One site, however, has seen continuing use despite the fact we’ve neglected it.

Six individuals called out support for PuzzleNode, including James Gray (@JEG2). A small group of us rallied together and came up with a plan to move PuzzleNode onto heroku’s servers. Three pull requests and a few days later the migration was complete. I’d like to again thank everyone who helped make that happen. I really didn’t want to see PuzzleNode go and I am glad that there are others who feel the same way.

So while we did save one app there were several others which, I am sad to say, have been shut down. Let’s take a quick look at each of them and discuss why we created them in the first place:

University Web

University Web is a Rails application which was the home of (Ruby) Mendicant University for the better part of two years. I gave a fairly decent overview of the app in my 2011 Ignite RailsConf talk about RbMU Tech. Here are some fun , and totally pointless, facts about the project:

First Commit: July 27, 2010 by Greg
Number of Contributors: 26
Number of Commits (on master): 1,242 (989 of those mine!)

Community

Community is another one of Mendicant’s Rails applications. It was designed to give our students and staff a place to share the things they’ve been working on as well as links to other works that they find interesting. Essentially it was Mendicant’s personal version of RubyFlow. I’ve kept a static archive of the site online at community.mendicantuniversity.org. More pointless stats. Yay!

First Commit: November 23, 2011 by Me
Number of Contributors: 10
Number of Commits (on master): 296

IRC Bots

Mendicant also ran two IRC bots: Mendibot and Anita. Mendibot, not to be confused with Medibot, fed logs into University Web, helped us with timezone math, plus a bunch of other fun little features. Anita was slated to replace Mendibot and had its own sinatra backend which could display transcripts in html, markdown, and json.

While it does make me a little sad to see these applications put to pasture I find solace in the fact that they helped so many people realize their true potential. I couldn’t be more proud of what we accomplished with Mendicant and I am so pleased to see former unicorns doing great things out in the world. What the future holds for Mendicant is yet to be seen, but I know I can’t wait to be a part of it.

<3 Jordan

Clojure Day Report

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

In Practicing Ruby issue 5.8 Gregory described his experiences in studying swarming behavior and how they lead to the discovery of a Rich Hickey project simulating an ant colony written in Clojure. Gregory decided to look into the Clojure code then Clojure itself and the Mendicant University Clojure Day was born. Several respondents expressed an interest in learning more about Clojure and it was decided that an email format would be best, with everyone researching on their own then reporting back to the group on November 29 [Clojure Day].

Gregory kicked things off around midnight on the 18th and a number of participants started in with their posts. Several folks were doing some reading; Morgan Nelson started Marick’s Functional Programming for the Object Oriented Programmer, a few others started reading Programming Clojure. Also there was the usual tool discussion with some trying to tackle Emacs along with Clojure and others sticking with Vim or whatever.

Gregory went back to Puzzle Node #4 Robots v Lasers and tried to port a solution from Ruby to Clojure:

So far, I’ve translated my parser class. Here’s what I came up with:

(def conveyor-symbols { \# :wall \| :laser })
(def robot-symbol "X")

(defn wall-data [text] (map #(conveyor-symbols %) text))

(defn conveyor-data [input]
  (let [[north middle south] (clojure.string/split input #"\n")]
    { :north_side     (wall-data north)
      :south_side     (wall-data south)
      :robot_position (.indexOf middle robot-symbol)}))

(pr (conveyor-data "#|#|#|##\n---X----\n###||###"))

The original Ruby code looked like this:

module Robotic
  class Parser
    CONVEYOR_SYMBOLS = { "#" => :wall, "|" => :laser }
    ROBOT_SYMBOL = "X"

    def initialize(text)
      @text = text
    end

    def conveyor_data
      north, middle, south = text.split
      { :north_side => wall_data(north),
        :south_side => wall_data(south),
        :robot_position => middle.index(ROBOT_SYMBOL) }
    end

    private

    attr_reader :text

    def wall_data(wall_text)
      wall_text.chars.map { |e| CONVEYOR_SYMBOLS[e] }
    end
  end
end

Greg hadn’t completed it but he stated how impressed he was that it was fairly easy

Shane Emmons revisited a Sinatra project using Noir emmons.io and pointed out some views where he had done some work with Hiccup, a Clojure based templating language: Shane, along with some others, looked at 4clojure a Clojure problem site sort of like Puzzlenode or Ruby Koans.

Carol Nichols mentioned a talk by Stuart Holloway on the impedence mismatch between objects and relational databases lead to a discussion about Datomic but no one had much experience with it. Finally there was a general discussion about functional v object oriented programming. We ended with a video of live programming using Clojure, Emacs and Supercollider in Overtone

It was an interesting experience. It sounds like most of the participants intend to explore Clojure further but not formal plans were made.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #11

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

While slow activity-wise, this week was very important for us to talk about our vision and our future as a community. Now is the time for you to step up and share your opinion.

What happened this week:

Gregory Brown wrote an important essay where he describes in detail what he believe should be the new vision for Mendicant University and how to bring it back to its true roots. He also posted it on the community list, and while the conversation had a slow start it’s building up. To see how the conversation is going you can read the archives. To share your opinion sign up for the community list.
Eric Gjertsen and Rafa de Castro held office hours this week. Discussions about method delegation in modules, and how to handle validations with a state machine can be reviewed on the transcript.

Upcoming Plans:

Right now we don’t have any scheduled activities. Check our RSS, twitter, and mailing list for updates.

Want to help us out? Consider running office hours or a study session yourself! Learn more here, and feel free to post questions in the Meta-discussions topic on our forum.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #10

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Summer is here and so is the 10th issue of “The Unicorn’s Horn”. We’ll try to gather what happend in our community this week and where are we going.

What happened this week:

We continued discussing on Monday through Skype the future of MU and how can we improve our current activities. You can find a except of what happened in The Big Picture. The article was also posted in the mailing list and some discussion is starting there. All comments are really appreciated.
Mentoring forum is starting to move a little bit. We have now some requests for mentoring and some interesting discussions. If you are interested in mentoring or being mentored, please, drop by.
We are posting this week’s issue of The Unicorn’s Horn to the mailing list. If you believe we forgot something or want something to appear in it. Please, tell us so.
Jordan Byron held office hours in our IRC channel #mendicant. He had some work and you can review Anita’s logs to check what happened there.

Upcoming Plans:

Summer has affected us all and we have almost no activities but Rafa de Castro will have office hours on Wednesday from 18:00 to 19:30 UTC.

Want to help us out? Consider running office hours or a study session yourself! Learn more here, and feel free to post questions in the Meta-discussions topic on our forum.

The Big Picture

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Gregory Brown recently stepped down from his leadership role within Mendicant University so that he could focus on growing his business and spending time with his baby boy. Since then, we have been transforming Mendicant University into a group-run program, lead by our homesteaders.

Last week, the homesteading crew gathered together to discuss how the school will move forward. Most of the nitty gritty details of running the school were nailed down, but the homesteaders didn’t have time to discuss the future of Mendicant University. With that in mind, we decided to meet again this week to work on those details.

The discussion started off with each participant discussing what they think is working well with the new Mendicant University. Eric was brave enough to go first, and expressed that overall the school is active given the limited amount of time that our community members have. Still, some important questions needed answering:

Jordan responded to these questions by confirming his own feelings that the school had lost its direction without Gregory at the helm:

Shane was in agreement with both Jordan and Eric:

Piotr then began to ponder how Mendicant could become more appealing to gain critical mass:

This lead the team to begin generating ideas which could help get Mendicant back on track.

Jordan proposed re-focusing Mendicant’s OSS work on socially positive projects like Main Street Mission and Mission of Mercy.
Piotr suggested Mendicant engage people based on what they want to do, versus what we tell them would improve their skills.
Felipe built on the concepts introduced by Gregory’s technical writing session by requiring people do some pre-activity work before they can participate.
Rafa highlighted the need to create a sense of ownership and belonging in Mendicant amongst newcomers.

Then, all of these ideas were integrated together by a proposal from Shane: Bring back a smaller version of the core course. The group agreed that the original core course is still not a sustainable project, but it served a critical role in Mendicant’s community.

In short, the idea is to run an activity which spans 2 to 3 weeks where Mendicant community members hack on a personal project or some other OSS project. Their work would be peer reviewed by other participants but all community members would be encouraged to mentor and help participants develop their projects.

With time running short, the group decided to hold off on discussing that project any further, but not before Jordan proposed bringing back Community. He thinks that the activity section of community could potentially solve many of the commitment and participation issues discussed. Plus he is also starting to get frustrated with Mendicant’s existing Jekyll based site.

Now it’s your turn. The homesteaders want to know if any of these ideas resonate with you, and what you think is the best plan for Mendicant. Please take some time and share your thoughts on our community mailing list.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #9

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

This week’s Unicorn’s Horn comes to you from a McDonald’s, deep in the mountains of Virginia.

What happened this week:

This past Monday a number of Mendicant Community members met over Skype and discussed how to keep Mendicant moving forward. This discussion was spurred after Greg stepped down as the driving force behind Mendicant.
Shane Emmons concluded the OSS clinic survey and published the results for everyone to see. The Survey was very encouraging. Keep an eye out for an OSS Clinic featuring Rubinius in the near future.
The forum saw some activity. faiswulff asked, ”where should I go next” and what beginner focused programs mendicant had to offer. rafadc continued the discussion on Beautiful Visualization with Chapter 1: On Beauty. Perhaps you could stop by and lend your voice to these discussions.

Upcoming Plans:

Eric Gjertsen is running office hours Monday, July 9 from 14:30 - 16:30 UTC.
Mendicant Community members are invited to join in on a Skype call Monday, July 9 at 19:00 UTC. During this call we’ll discuss the two big philosophical questions. “What are we doing here at Mendicant, and why are we doing it?”
Brent Vante is planning to run a weekend hackfest in the next two weeks.

Want to help us out? Consider running office hours or a study session yourself! Learn more here, and feel free to post questions in the Meta-discussions topic on our forum.

OSS Clinic Survey Results

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Two weeks ago Shane Emmons posted a survey to gather feelings on past and future OSS Clinic offerings. You can now view the results yourself.

The results of this survey were very encouraging. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for details on an upcoming OSS Clinic featuring Rubinius.

Continuing to Move Mendicant Forward

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Gregory Brown started Mendicant University over two years ago. Since then he has been the driving force behind Mendicant. His relentless focus and dedication helped us to grow into an extraordinary community. But Greg is only human; fatherhood and a growing business have stretched him thin. So, instead of burning out, Greg came to the hard decision to step down from his leadership role in the Mendicant Community.

Not wanting Mendicant’s current momentum to flounder, a number of community members and Homesteaders met via Skype to discuss how to keep mendicant moving forward. In an effort to focus, the meeting centered around the question of “how”.

An organization tends to flounder if its members don’t have a common understanding of its direction and values. This knowledge brought us to a realization during the meeting that the community needs to a clearly defined set of principles and directions we’d like to move in. Without these it is very difficult to explain to new individuals what Mendicant is about and how it works. Some work has begun with the Community Guidelines but a focused effort is still necessary.

As technologists, we often focus on the “how” of a problem. But there is so much interesting in the “why” of a problem. It was with this in mind that a new focus on communicating that “why” of our actions in updates is being attempted. So, instead of seeing raw transcripts and summaries, authors of posts will try to give you the narrative behind the summary (in addition to transcripts and summaries). Look for examples coming from Jordan Byron (Gary Bernhardt discussion) and Felipe Doria (Gregory Moeck discussion).

A number of other topics specific to Homesteaders were discussed. Some of these topics were:

Limiting ourselves to a single “long term” task at a time to avoid burn out.
Trying to maintain an at least one activity a week pace.
Build a guide that list tasks needed to be done weekly, monthly, etc.
Guidelines for who posts the Unicorn’s Horn, Homesteading Standup, etc each week.

This meeting was a great success and will help to propel us forward. But there is still more work to be done, more discussions to be had. On Monday, July 9 at 19:00 UTC we will again be meeting on Skype to discuss, “What are we doing here at Mendicant, and why are we doing it?” If you’d like to add your voice to the discussion, plan to me in the #mendicant channel on IRC at that time we’ll invite you to the call. You can also post your Skype handle on the forum and Shane will make sure to invite you on Monday.

Mendicant is moving into exciting new territories. I hope everyones as excited as we, the Homesteaders, are.

For those interested, you can find our meeting notes here.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #8

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

What happened this week:

Eric Gjersten ran office hours this past Thursday where he answered a question about safe buffers in Rails 3
Shane Emmons asked our community members to give some feedback on open source software clinics. Shane ran the first open clinic two weeks ago on Anita, Mendicant’s new IRC bot.
The Mendicant Homesteaders setup a time to meet next week where they will discuss the future plans for Mendicant now that Gregory has stepped out of his coordinator role.

Upcoming Plans:

As of right now we don’t have any scheduled activities for the coming week, but be sure to check this site, twitter, or our RSS feed for new activities posted during the week.

Want to help us out? Consider running office hours or a study session yourself! Learn more here, and feel free to post questions in the Meta-discussions topic on our forum.

Open Source Software Clinic Survey

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

We’d like to gauge interest in future OSS Clinics. If you have time, please answer these survey questions to help us improve our execution.

OSS Clinics are meant to be a period of time (similar to a hackday) where the community focuses their energy on a single OSS project. This serves two purposes. To give back to the project and also give those new to OSS a safe and helpful environment for getting their feet wet with OSS contribution.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #7

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

What happened this week:

Eric Gjersten ran office hours, which lead to an interesting discussion about testing.
Sean Marcia ran a session called Share your favourite gem, inviting everyone to recommend the gems that they have found especially useful or interesting. Afterwards, Sean compiled the list of gems that participants had suggested.
Gary Bernhardt joined us for a session on persistence objects vs. domain objects. The original plan was to discuss the topic for an hour or so, but Gary stayed around long after that to answer questions on a wide range of topics. We still need to put together a detailed summary, but you can check out the meeting notes and transcript for now.
We celebrated Mendicant University’s two year birthday with a social gathering, which mostly resulted in conversations about video games, but was fun nonetheless!
Gregory Brown announced that he needs to take a break from administrative responsibilities at Mendicant. He will still be around helping out with various things as needed, but now more than ever Mendicant will need the help of the whole community to keep thriving.

Upcoming Plans:

Eric Gjertsen is hosting office hours on Thursday, June 28. If you have Ruby questions or want a code review, be sure to stop by.

We don’t have any other scheduled events for next week just yet, as we’re catching up from a very busy couple of weeks. But you can expect to see more soon, including our first weekend hack day.

Want to help us out? Consider running office hours or a study session yourself! Learn more here, and feel free to post questions in the Meta-discussions topic on our forum.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #6

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wow what an amazing week it has been here at Mendicant University! If you haven’t had an opportunity to get involved yet, don’t worry. Each week we have a bunch of different activities and this is the place to see what happened, and what’s coming up next at Mendicant.

What happened this week:

Shane Emmons ran an open source software clinic this past Monday which focused on Anita, Mendicant’s new IRC bot. A bunch of new ideas were generated and everyone is encouraged to get hackin’.
That same day Eric Gjertsen held office hours where he reviewed an implementation of the turtle tracks puzzle and reviewed a data conversion project.
On Thursday Mendicant hosted its 5th Global Hack Day. Participants worked on a wide range of projects throughout the day. To see a full transcript and a list of projects hacked on, check out the event’s wiki page

Upcoming Plans:

Sean Marcia will host a ”Share Your Favourite Gem” discussion next Tuesday. Come swap gems — from the must-haves to the most unknown.
After that, Pablo Torres and Gary Bernhardt will be hosting a group study session on Persistence Objects vs Domain Logic.
Mendicant is putting together its first “Meet-n-Greet” on Thursday right before the Mendicant Birthday Gathering. Stop by to meet new people and have some fun before the party “officially” starts.
Lastly, Mendicant turned the big 2.0 (years) a few weeks ago and we want to mark the occasion with an informal gathering. As always everyone is invited to come hang out, post their favorite cat pictures, and just goof around.

That’s all the news for this week. Stay tuned for another issue of the Unicorn’s Horn next week and have fun. Go Unicorns!

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #5

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

It’s been a busy week in Mendicant-land. As we finish up week 5 of the new direction for Mendicant University, we’re seeing an increasing number of community members stepping up and organizing office hours, study sessions, open source clinics, and more. The amount and variety of activities are helping to shape the future of MU. Let’s keep it up!

This week also marks the 2-year anniversary of Mendicant University’s conception from the brain of Gregory Brown and into the world. For your enjoyment, here’s the idea that started it all. We want to commemorate our birthday with an ‘open house’ event soon, so stay tuned.

If you’d like to get involved in the homesteading effort to document and map out the infrastructure needed for the new MU, drop us a line in the forums. We can always use the extra help.

What happened this week:

Gregory Brown organized a workshop on technical writing on Tuesday. Five folks participated in the writing exercise that Greg prepared ahead of time that formed the basis for the session, and several others joined in the discussion. Topics included the tradeoffs involved in using of novel vs generic terms, defining what to assume about your readers, advantages and disadvantages of including a glossary, use of sidebars and hypertext effects, recall costs of specialized terms, use of metaphor, and more. The transcript here, and a summary will be released soon.
Greg also held a study session/roundtable discussion Friday on using mock objects in testing, together with Greg Moeck and Eric Hodel, based on Greg Moeck’s 2011 RubyConf talk, which we watched concurrently. A huge amount of ground was covered (see the etherpad and transcript). This one may take us a few days to summarize, but we’ll announce it here when we do.
Rafa de Castro’s book reading club for Beautiful Visualization has started - you can join in on this forum thread. The first chapter we’re discussing is on wordle (a word cloud generator), and you can read it for free here.
Eric Gjertsen and Pablo Torres each held office hours this week. Pablo is offering to help with Python questions as well as Ruby. If you have experience with different languages, please feel free to offer up your expertise to the community.
Also, if you can speak/write another human language, be sure to add your name to the translators’ list we’ve started.

Upcoming Plans:

Shane Emmons is running a open source software clinic on Monday, June 11, focused on hacking on Anita, the new Mendicant IRC bot.
Eric Gjertsen is again having office hours on Monday, which hopefully will become a standing weekly appointment.
The 5th Global Hack Day is happening on Thursday, June 14. Sign up here if you plan to participate, even if you don’t have a project to work on, to let folks know you’d be available to help them with their work.
The following week, Sean Marcia will host a ”Share Your Favourite Gem” discussion on Tuesday June 19. Come swap gems — from the must-haves to the most unknown.
The Mendicant homesteaders will continue to work on whatever needs to be done to make the new Mendicant University a wonderful place to be.

That’s all the news for this week. Stay tuned for another issue of the Unicorn’s Horn next week and have fun. Go Unicorns!

Book Club: Beautiful Visualization

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Starting today, Rafa de Castro is organizing a small reading group for the book Beautiful Visualization. We will start with the third chapter, publicly available online so nobody has to buy anything in advance. We will discuss the chapter in the new forums.

We will try to read one chapter a week (they are short, don’t be afraid) and discuss the chapter we read the week before. Anyway do not feel forced to follow the schedule. Just try to have a enjoyable pace and have fun with the discussion.

The art of displaying lots of information in a meaningful way is a skill that everybody can benefit from having, not only programmers. Everybody is invited to drop by and discuss.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #4

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

When Mendicant University was still a private community, most of the burden of organizing and executing courses and activities fell on Gregory Brown’s shoulders. This is something we wanted to change in our new way of doing things. While this week was rather calm activity-wise, the homesteaders are working to make the new Mendicant an easy community for someone to pitch an activity idea, organize it with those interested and run it publicly.

What happened this week:

We worked on defining and documenting how to organize activities. This is a work in progress so we are constantly looking to refine it and make it easier for all involved. Right now you can check our guides on How to organize a study session and How to post an activity to mendicantuniversity.org
Continued improvement on Anita (our own IRC bot) so that it’s in a good shape for accepting contributions.

Upcoming Plans:

Eric Gjertsen is running open office hours on Monday, June 04. Come to request code reviews or ask questions no matter your programming level on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Gregory Brown will host a Technical Writing Study Session on Tuesday, June 05. All are welcome to come listen in, but those who wish to be actively involved in the session are strongly encouraged to complete this preliminary writing task.
Rafa de Castro is organizing a Reading Club for Beautiful Visualization. It’s still in the preparations stage so come show your interest.
Gregory Brown, Eric Hodel, and Gregory Moeck will be hosting a study session on Test-Driven Development within the next few days. Stay tuned for details.
Shane Emmons is organizing an event for folks to get together and hack on the Anita IRC bot, and it will most likely be run on Monday, June 11.
The Mendicant homesteaders will continue to work on whatever needs to be done to make the new Mendicant University a wonderful place to be. In particular, we will continue working on documentation explaining how to get involved, and how our school works.

That’s all the news for this week. Stay tuned for another issue of the Unicorn’s Horn next week and have fun! Go Unicorns!

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #3

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Howdy everybody! Here’s your weekly dose of Mendicant news.

What happened this week:

Jordan Byron and Shane Emmons held office hours this week. Discussions ranged from Rails to Marching Band.
We held a Town Hall meeting on Wednesday. We discussed why people are involved with Mendicant, and began discussing our community Guidelines. Specifically we focused on how to maintain Mendicant as a safe community and to define our relationship with Open Source. You can read all about it in this meeting summary.

Upcoming Plans:

Greg will soon be running his Technical Writing Clinic.
We will almost certainly offer some free-form office hours, but they have not yet been scheduled. Keep an eye on this website, or follow @mendicant_news if you are interested in participating.
The Mendicant homesteaders will continue to work on whatever needs to be done to make the new Mendicant University a wonderful place to be. In particular, we will continue working on documentation explaining how to get involved, and how our school works.

That’s all the news for this week. Stay tuned for another issue of the Unicorn’s Horn next week and have fun! Go Unicorns!

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #2

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Hi everyone. Here comes another weekly dose of news about Mendicant University!

What happened this week:

Vanilla Forums went down for a few hours unexpectedly. This wouldn’t be a big deal, but the whole reason we were experimenting with the forum in the first place is because we wanted something more stable. Still, we don’t see an immediate better option, so we will continue testing it out over the next few weeks.
Anita (our own IRC bot) is working now. Anita makes it easy for us to generate HTML, Markdown, and JSON formatted logs for discussions that happen in the #mendicant channel. The HTML format can probably use some styling love, so please send us a pull request if you’d like!
We held another social gathering in #mendicant channel in freenode. If you’re curious about what we discussed, you can check out this chat transcript.
We held our fourth Global Hack Day on May 17. While some folks hacked on various different projects, for others it provided a convenient time and place to ask some questions about what Mendicant University is all about. Ideas were exhanged, and code was written, so all in all it was a great hack day. You can check out the full transcript for more details.

Our plans for next week:

There will be a town hall meeting dedicated to the topic of Defining Mendicant University’s culture. We plan to use this event to discuss and continue to develop our community guidelines, which are a work-in-progress.
We will continue preparing for our first session on technical writing, which will be taught by Gregory Brown. There is a preliminary assignment for those that want to participate, and submissions are due on May 24.
We will almost certainly offer some free-form office hours, but they have not yet been scheduled. Keep an eye on this website, or follow @mendicant_news if you are interested in participating.
The Mendicant homesteaders will continue to work on whatever needs to be done to make the new Mendicant University a wonderful place to be. In particular, we will continue working on documentation explaining how to get involved, and how our school works.

That’s all the news for this week. Stay tuned for another issue of the Unicorn’s Horn next week and have fun! Go Unicorns!

Plans for a session on technical writing

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Gregory Brown will be running a 90-minute study session on technical writing in late May or early June. This session will focus on the general challenges involved in communicating complex ideas through writing, and does not require any special background in a particular field. Both experienced and inexperienced writers are welcome to participate!

To make sure that those attending the session have some common ground to start from, Gregory has put together a preliminary writing task that should be completed by all those who wish to participate in this activity.

While the exact date and time for the study session has not yet been set, the deadline for the preliminary exercise is May 24. Please see the task description for more details.

No matter what kind of work you do, improving your understanding of the fundamentals of technical writing will make you a better teacher AND a better learner. This session will hopefully be the first of many on this very important topic.

The Unicorn's Horn, Issue #1

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

It’s hard to believe how quickly time passes: A week ago Mendicant University was still a private community, but now all of our efforts are focused on tearing down those walls. We have made some great progress over the last few days, and next week is looking like it will be even better.

What happened this week:

Gregory Brown posted a very detailed set of notes from last week’s TDD study session with Eric Hodel. These notes cover a diverse set of testing challenges that Gregory encountered while trying to develop a fairly simple game using the Ray game engine.
Jordan Byron and Gregory Brown worked on improving the styling of this website. We are at a point where we are mostly happy with it, except for the all updates and all activities pages. Patches are welcome for improving those!
The Mendicant University Homesteaders sprung into action and started working on a number of initial tasks for bootstrapping the new Mendicant University. Among other things, homesteaders are currently improving documentation about the school, organizing activities, and trying out Vanilla forums as a possible replacement for our somewhat unstable mailing list setup.
We set up a new public mailing list for our community to use, but it was down for almost 48 hours due to problems with Dreamhost. Once things came back alive, we started a nice introductions thread so that our newcomers and existing community members could get to know one another.
Gregory Brown posted an update with some background information about his original vision for Mendicant University. Please check this post out if you want to learn more about what we are trying to do here; understanding our past is key to figuring out where we’d like to end up in the future.
Carlos Antonio released his i18n_alchemy gem, a project he built several months ago during a course here at Mendicant University.

Our plans for next week:

Shane Emmons is running open office hours on Monday, May 14. All are welcome to request code reviews, ask questions, or otherwise get help with their projects on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Eric Gjersten is hosting a social gathering on Tuesday, May 15. Come get to know the folks involved with Mendicant University, and have some fun doing it!
Gregory Brown has scheduled Global Hack Day #4 on Thursday, May 17. If you have a project that you can use some help with, or you want to contribute to someone else’s project, this is a great way to do it. Even if you plan to work on your own side project, it is nice to be able to occasionally share some status updates or ask some questions as you go, and our hack days are perfect for that kind of thing.
The homesteaders will continue to work on various tasks that will help us get through this transition phase smoothly. We still need a few more volunteers to help out, so be sure to contact Gregory Brown if you are an existing community member who would like to help us build out the foundation for the new school.

That pretty much wraps up what we’ve been working on this week and what we plan to do in the coming week. Be sure to stay tuned for another Unicorn’s Horn post next Friday, or help make the news by participating in our projects and activities between now and then.

The road to defining our culture

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

A huge part of the challenge of creating a new Mendicant University, is that we need to figure out how to collectively define our culture. This is much harder to do in an open environment than it is in a closed one, and was something we struggled with even when we ran our program in private.

As new folks join our community, they will inevitably want to know what sets us apart from the thousands of other places online where they can learn and work together with others. It is going to take us a lot of time and effort to come up with a satisfying answer to that question, but we need to start working on it right away.

While we are very much rebuilding our community from scratch, some ideas from our past can provide a nice starting point for defining the future of Mendicant University. In particular, if you have not read the following articles, they may help you understand our motivations for building this school in the first place:

While all of these posts are somewhat dated, they should provide a good starting place for conversations about what the culture of the new Mendicant University community ought to be. We are trying to do something much deeper than simply teaching technical skills, and no matter how much we change, we will always be looking for ways to make a deeper impact on the world.

TDD study session summary

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

On 2012 May 03, Gregory Brown and Eric Hodel met to discuss various challenges in test-driven development while encouraging the Mendicant University community to listen in and share their thoughts as well. The epic meeting lasted over three hours, covering the following topics:

Testing code that depends on randomization
Testing callbacks in a publish/subscribe system
The challenges involved in UI-based acceptance testing
Dealing with brittle tests and magic numbers
Speeding up the refactoring feedback loop

A detailed summary of the discussion as well as a full transcript from the meeting are available over on the Mendicant University wiki.

Building a new kind of school

community@mendicantuniversity.org (Mendicant Community) — Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huge changes are in the winds for us here at Mendicant University. After two years of running our program in private, we have decided to finally tear down our walls and open up to all those who wish to get involved. But in order to do that, we need to radically alter the way we do things.

The old Mendicant University was centered around courses, and our core skills course in particular was our flagship offering. While that course was truly unique and offered an excellent experience for both its students and instructors, it was extremely costly to run. To be precise, a single three week session came at a cost of over 1000 person-hours. This alone may help explain why we chose to strictly limit the growth of our program over the last couple years, but if you look at our other courses and projects, you’ll find that they also involved huge commitments for all those involved.

Over time, our surplus of ambition caught up with us. We ended up with a community that wanted to continue to learn and grow together, but had a hard time keeping up with things because our projects became more complex and more demanding over time. While we continued to provide good learning experiences and meaningful contributions to various projects, we managed to do so more by brute-force effort than anything else. As this became more and more apparent, we realized that we must completely change our way of doing things if we wanted to avoid organizational burnout.

As a result of this struggle, seeds for a new Mendicant University were recently planted. In the coming weeks and months, we will effectively become a school without courses, open to all those who want to get involved. Our new activities and events will be measurable on a scale of hours and days rather than weeks and months, which will make them easier to participate in and easier to run. Our hope is that this change will make our program more flexible while allowing us to stay true to the cultural values that we have developed over the last two years.

While the next few weeks are bound to be turbulent, you can take a look at our roadmap to get a sense of where things are heading. We will update this website as well as the @mendicant_news twitter feed as we work our way through this transition phase, so be sure to stay tuned if you’d like to be an active participant in the new Mendicant University.