I guess it's not interesting for most people to read something about me, and because most information I usually tend to give away has already been seen and discussed in the IRC channel (Profesionnal tip: Being in this digital classroom at other times than class is not the worst idea. Beneath interesting discussions about FOSS and other things you are more likely to get some pieces of information way earlier than the people just following the mailing list.) I'll skip this part of the essay and head straight to the more interesting things, namely ..
Kushal has been very patient, very helpful to everyone and has aimed his efforts towards anybody willing to learn a thing or two. And for most of the time it felt like his efforts and he himself have been kicked by, virtual, feet.
The correct behaviour for mailing lists or, more general, the ways how free projects communicate, have been a matter of discussion in one of the first lessons. There was plenty of material provided, especially aimed at those people that have never had any contact with this topic before. And a lot of folks said "Thank you very much! That looks like some good material to read!"
This was about a week ago. We have started actually using the mailing list for communication just a few days ago - and it was pure chaos. Even worse, it mostly still is. HTML mail, top postings, massquotings, completely empty mails .. I mean, seriously? Did anyone even read anything about mailing lists?
It was the same for the introductory class held on git. The concept of a decentralized source code management system may be new, but it's not that complicated to grasp and the theoretical part was held as short as possible and the practic approach was very basic and slow, slow enough that even complete beginners should have been capable of following. It was also stated that if you don't know something you should first take a look into the world wide web and after you've done this - if you remain undelighted - you are gladly welcome to ask, in a proper way with enough information provided by you so that folks willing to help you won't have to look into their magic information glassball.
"Is not working", "this does not werk help" [Mistake intended.] and questions like this were the main ones were coming up. And many of them resulted out of the lack of basics, not-read-assignments or stubbornness. Maybe ten percent or even less were actual problems above the usual complexity. Is this really necessary?
Even if it looks like it I'm in no way saying that I'm perfect. I make mistakes too. I was just lucky enough that I was mostly in the IRC when kushal needed somebody for testing purposes and therefore was capable of avoiding the mailing list for now. Maybe this whole article will be a huge failure and I'm going to make a ton of mistakes. But that's the path of learning. Fail, learn out of it, try again and make it better. I've just been missing the "make it better"-part in the last few days ..
I work around ten hours every day, sometimes more and sometimes less. Beneath that I have to run a household for myself and try to educate me in order to keep developing myself in my profession. So you can believe me that I know how it feels to have little time to spend. And that you are exhausted after being busy all day. And that you sometimes just want to go to sleep or just relax a little bit. Even though some people would not agree with me I consider that a normal and absolutely legitimate feeling. But how about investing fifteen more minutes on reading some assignment for this class. Or play around with the Python interpreter a little bit? Fifteen minutes seem to be a waste of time for most people, but if they are wasted, why not waste them on class-related stuff? You don't even need to take this journey alone, there are people at the IRC waiting for somebody to come have a chat with them. They are eager to help. And they don't charge you anything. The only thing they ask for is that you stick to some simple rules. That is all. This small commitment would take a lot of pain from kushal's back. And therefore would help us all by making the course easier manageable for him.
Something else what bothers me is the fact that for me (I like to emphasize this. I'm not the holder of the ultimate truth, even though I'd sometimes love to be.) it often looks like many people are not actually enjoying what they are doing. To me it feels like they are attending the lessons just like one of those lessons back at school, maybe about a subject you really did not like but you had to attend the lessons anyway. I feel like the euphoria to learn something new is not really there. Learning something is the main goal of this course, for sure. But learning should go hand-in-hand with enjoying something. I urge you to think about this.