Hi Avi,

Great, bringing in the real pros into this. Personally, I don't feel that
the 7 day timespan is sacred, since everyone isn't getting locked up in the
Monster Garage until completion. I certainly wouldn't feel bad if it spanned
two weekends and the week in between time wise, I think that's more up to
the build team and schedules. However, I don't think it should not be over
10 linear days. Same with three weekends. Ideally of course you try to use
as little time as possible and provide a feature set as rich as possible. I
like the concept of the design only happening in the first day or two. I
think there is a lot of valuable information to be gathered from deviations
from the initial design plans when building.

Of course, you don't have to lobby me about using Seaside (I'm already a
fan), but that's for you and the team members to decide :-) Some of the best
bits on Monster Garage are when folks have what we'll politely call
'different views' on how things should be put together. You should note that
there are probably people out there who (hopefully) will use the code as
exemplars for code metrics and clarity, so there will probably be a lot of
design decisions based on that. One of the underlying themes is that newbies
can grok what's going on if they're familiar with what the application is
trying to accomplish.

Because you use a weblog server yourself you probably already pretty much
understand what's going on. What I'm asking of any participant is that you
go over what's up on the Swiki and ask for clarification or amplification of
what the task is. Also no 'pre-builds' or trying to get a jump start. I know
it's hard not to think about it in advance, but you will also have to take
into consideration what other members of the build team are thinking. My
feeling is that you walk into the garage, have the tools, supplies, and
vehicle ready. It's not on you to have to figure out what to build, it's up
to you to design and build what has been described and then take all the
glory for having done so.

The teams have total freedom on how to collaborate, but I'm thinking that
the team members might want to get together on IRC or IM to chat amongst
themselves and come up with design ideas, then place it on the Swiki. I have
a FreeCloud discussion server (a wiki like facility with a lot of different
features for group collaboration) that I will gladly make available, however
it requires MS Internet Explorer version 5.5+. That probably makes it
unusable for most teams (or illegal in some countries ;), but the offer
stands.

Jim

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Avi Bryant" <avi at beta4.com>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 5:15 PM
Subject: Re: Squeak Weblog Server - The Challenge


>
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Jim Benson wrote:
>
> > If this is something that people are interested in participating in, I'd
> > like to hear about it and some details as to what you think an
appropriate
> > time frame for the challenge would be.
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> Interesting idea.  My guess is that it will work better as, say, two
> weekends rather than one continuous multi-day effort.  But count me in, as
> long as the timing is right.
>
> I warn you, though, I'll definitely be pushing to use Seaside for the web
> UI... ;)
>
> Avi
>
>