Last summer, I had the good fortune of taking part in Red Hat’s 2009 POSSE. It was an absolutely excellent experience, and many of the things we did and talked about have required much reflection and continued conversation for the ideas to take root. It also took some hutzpah: along with a colleague (and super-ninja support from Mel), we dove off a cliff this past term along with 40 of our students, introducing them to the Fedora project as seen through the eyes of the Marketing and Design teams.
I thought I would share a highlight from the day, though, that goes back to when Christian and I were at RH last summer. We shared with the group work we had been doing on making parallel programming more approachable. Specifically, we had recently completed a port of our virtual machine to the Arduino, thus bringing the venerable language occam to this popular embedded platform. (If you don’t know what an Arduino is, please… crawl out from underneath your IBM Model M keyboard, go to SparkFun or NKC Electronics, and buy one.)
An Arduino in its native habitat.
We thought our tools needed more work before we released. Our POSSE mentors were floored that we hadn’t released already! We realized that “release early, release often” really does mean getting your software out before it is fully baked. In our case, we were worried that the 70+ pages of book (incomplete) and only having installer support for one platform (Mac) wasn’t far enough along… this, apparently, is around version 3.8-RC2 for most projects.
Or, not. But their point was made. So, we released. I put the tools into use in my classroom (things worked just fine), and we decided we’d just keep pushing and promoting. As a result, we will be presenting at OSCON later this summer (very exciting), and we have two contributors from the world at large who are exploring the use of our tools in their own projects. We’ve created a “community” space in our repository and given them commit access, as well as a branch (in one case) so they can add new low-level features without worrying about leaving trunk in a broken state.
More than anything else, having the new contributors is what makes it fun. People poking at what we’ve done, asking questions, and trying new things… that’s a blast. Today, we got picked up by Slashdot, and my sincere hope is that we’ll pick up a few more explorers before the week is out.
If anyone is interested, I now have a (very gross) binary Debian package that you can explore — join the users mailing list and inquire if you want to try it out. We’ll get our IDE for Windows done soon, and put the polish on the site as we head off to share the fruits of our efforts at OSCON.
So, remember: radical transparency and release early, release often.