Ubuntu Opportunistic Developers Week

I've been following along with the latest community program from Ubuntu this week - Ubuntu Opportunistic Developers Week. There are a number of talks, each one hour long, which aim to stir up some action in the minds of would-be developers.

The talks are carried out through a tool called Lernid from community manager Jono Bacon. I feel this has been very successful in bringing down the perceived barriers between the well known developers and those of us who wish to get an application going.

Listeners were encouraged at the beginning of the week to think of an app and, hopefully by the end of the week, make it happen. Almost all levels of programmer could benefit from the talks and the leaders were very willing to answer in depth questioning throughout.

The format has worked really well in that you can choose which parts to listen in on and somehow feel less intimidated to ask questions than in a real-life conference.

The week has definitely inspired me so far to start putting some of the ideas I've had in to practise. A few of the projects I had tried before such as Quickly and Ground Control, but I was good to hear from the humans behind them. Talks that engaged me especially were CouchDB/DesktopCouch with Stuart Langridge, GStreamer with Laszlo Pandy and GooCanvas with Rick Spencer.

I look forward to the rest of the week and hope it inspires many more developers like me to create some really cool open-source apps. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to make it possible.