The Unicorn’s Horn is a weekly summary of what we have been up to lately at Mendicant University. It should come in handy for folks who want to keep up with what we are working on, but don’t have time to read each and every one of our updates.
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.
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.
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.