Hi there,
 
    I been thinking about the value of blogs talking daily Squeak use.
Squeak users/developers probably use the squeak's environment in different
ways according to what they do/develop. And because Smalltalk was designed
with the extremely valuable feature of making possible to be all inteligible
for one individual, that sometimes could be a lonely task. That hasn't to be
bad until the developer starts to loose valuable experiences because of
that. For instance, if you are in pair programming, one developer could
learn about a new way to find a method faster or a different class browser
or a different subtle and clever way to use the browser, and so on... 
 
    That subtlelties that are easily transmitted person to person so
meetings, BOf's and educational experiences are great to patch that, but
what if your profile just don't have access to that at certain moment to any
of those?
 
    I think, (and I may be right or not in this) that there are lots of
people that fits in this profile at least for some time and there is a gap
on support to those people. The result of that gap is clear, or the person
surpass it by itself or not. 
 
    If is interesting to us that more persons can surpass that gap and find
the completeness of the squeak experience I think that fact makes
interesting to us to have vehicles (blogs are the more feasible I think)
with articles that friendly introduces stories of developments that in fact
are merely excuses to comunicate tips that should be fulfilling the gap.
Even when they may seem to be silly for more experienced developers.
 
    I barely imagine a newbie's frustration to understand the complete cycle
experience of developing with squeak because it happends to me the silly
thing that I dicovered yesterday the preferences browser after some years of
using squeak. Yes I know, I wasn't reading the menu and exploring that
option by myself, but maybe that shouldn't be the only access to that
information and access to information is what I'm talking about.
 
    Maybe universities and schools that uses Squeak are aware and have taken
measures about this, but I wanted to put this here "just in case" and
because I think that is valuable for squeak and the whole smalltalk comunity
that we have more bolgs that concentrates the veteran squeakers
virtual-environmental experiences that acts as welcome and friendly "doors"
to the knowledge and people can have an emotionally smoother experiences
surpassing the squeak/smalltalk experience gaps and knowledge barriers.
 
    cheers,
 
Sebastian Sastre

 

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