Planned Development Community Idea (important)
Please read through this, it is a very serious attempt to create a strong development community.
Ok this is going to sound like another bad idea probably.. but i figured I'd give it a try (haha, look at the time on this post, I'm not going to sleep tonight, because i haven't stayed up this late in such a long time) I know that there have been attempts in the past at Development communities, usually they don't turn out well at all (Golden Bunny spamming every board on the subject comes to mind) But I'm a lot more serious than he is, and I am actually proposing a more developed plan here.
About Concept of Zero: I registred the domain www.conceptofzero.com and I am paying for hosting. However at first (the past year) we weren't getting anything done (school, and the fact I was the only real programmer in the bunch, i had just brought some of my friends into the company w/ me and they were learning) Well now they have completed some CS courses at school, and they are more into it.. but we still are understaffed. (especially in art + music :) ) My best friend and I (he is the VP, i'm the Pres) decided we would allow people who we didnt know personally into the "company".
As for my personal experience. I know tons of C++ (I actually had to teach my Pascal teacher some and help her convert her course to C++/OOP to get ready b/c the APCS exam is in Java in 2003) and I have at least small amount of experience in most APIs out there, Allegro,SDL,DirectDraw5,some OpenGL. (I also know 7-8 languages, from small half-languages like HTML 4.1 to C++ and Basic Java) And what I dont know I'm more than willing to learn, I have 19 programming books (i'm actually selling some soon) and I'm always getting more or downloading tutorials.
I know especially since this is the summer a lot of us have extra time, so I think that if a good sized group of us got together to create a development community (where we could work on stuff together, like if we had 20 members we may have a few groups working together on small-medium sized projects) The development community I would be willing to host on my own server with my own money, and since a lot of us have this free time in the summer we could easily build a strong community now, so when we are busy again we dont need to worry about the entire thing falling apart.
In my vision this community would have several major purposes, one to give programmers a place to meet other programmers and learn (similar to what happens here but in closer contact), two to produce some nice moderate sized projects/games/whatever instead of forcing everyone to work alone. (What I mean there is that in the development community you may know that I am a good AI writer or something, and you are a good engine writer, so you'd ask me if i'm interested in a project, and If I wasn't busy we'd team up to work on the project, not any sort of Software company deal where teams would get together to do a project for the company, what the people involved in the project did with their code/binary would be completely their choice) And the third, and very important purpose of this community would be to teach the less experienced. This could be done by tutorials put on the organizations website, small projects the less experienced are given small jobs with, or any other means of teaching. The reason this would work so well (at least in my mind) is because they would get exposure from people usually close in age to them, it wouldn't be a judging environment like boards often become (flaming newbies and such) because if you chose to work with newbies you'd know what you were getting yourself into, they wouldn't just be problems. Also as the newbies learn, they would become more able to teach, adding to our community signifigantly if we stay in it for the long run.
I do realize I haven't slept in 20 hours, so some of this may not make sense, but if enough people are interested I can turn conceptofzero.com into a whole organization for developers to convene and work together.
edit: i realized i meant to make it clear that this wouldn't be a company, really more of an organization (no company hierarchy or any of that)
