What a fantastic idea. The problem with bright new coders, particularly ones who come from rigorous but relatively-short learn-to-code curriculums, is that they haven't been exposed to enough best practices. It's easy to create a beautiful site that mashes two APIs in an amusing way...but creating something that can be used and modified and relied upon requires a new level of skill at abstraction and (logistical) design...and what better way to drill the concepts of decoupling and orhthogonality than to practice jumping into a 10K LOC code base and identify the modules and snippets that you can fix?
"Hacker School would be far worse if it didn't take place in person. Friendship, comfort and trust, all of which are necessary for effective learning, are more easily built in person than online."
I'm curious if this is more a consequence of the medium (internet/phone) and its lack of tools or this specific goal (developing software). I would imagine that it is easier to build a friendship through, say, playing World of Warcraft together than pair programming. Perhaps this is because software development tends to be a more solitary activity and we're slower to accept others in it.
I probably could have elaborated a bit on this point in the blog post, but I wanted to keep it short. It's a good question though, and it's worth answering.
One of the surprising things we've learned while running Hacker School is the extent to which your comfort level dictates how much you will learn. To learn effectively, you need to be able to ask questions without worrying about looking stupid, you need to be able to admit when you don't know something, and you need to be able to jump into things that are over your head and know that you'll be able to figure them out as you go. Your ability to do all of these things is related to how comfortable you are with your environment and the people in it.
When I wrote about the situations where people build friendship, comfort and trust, I wasn't thinking about pairing sessions (though it can happen there). I was thinking about all the other things you end up doing when you're in the same place with a bunch of people for an extended period of time. Comfort gets built during group lunches, on the weekends, at movies, concerts, in the park, at bars, the beach, etc. Hopefully this clears things up a bit.
EDIT: "talking" -> "thinking" in the second paragraph.
I just touched on the development aspect I found interesting, but I understood the underlying intent: the "other" things. I agree about group lunch being very important for developers working together as one. I've experienced both sides of the coin and there is a discernible difference in relationships/familiarity between the two. I'm curious if this group setting can ever be replicated virtually. I don't think Soylent IV & Skype will do the trick. :)
I'd love to see a postmortem blog post after the next class from both students and maintainers and what did and didn't work with the virtual program.
In my case it's depended a lot on the other person. My closest friends fall into any combination of: 1) people I talk to mainly in person; 2) people I talk to mainly online; and 3) people I talk to frequently through both mediums. I don't see a strong inherent difference between the three categories, at least in my case; my mostly-in-person-chat friends aren't generally closer friends than the other categories. But with some people it's very hard to build more-online friendships, mostly people who, either through unfamiliarity or inclination, don't use IM or IRC in a conversational way with nuances, and treat it instead as more of a stiff/impersonal medium. With other people it's the reverse, and actually hard to build more-in-person friendships, especially with people who are much more open in text discussions than in person (common among tech people, including myself).
