Iwould love to see your course program, how you implement it and some tips and tricks. I strongly think it would motivate more than one professor all over the world.

Thanks again!

Love the story, thanks for sharing it. I can’t help you with feeling like you’re getting old, though. It was 2005 when we started, and I’ll let you do the math

As regards measuring fixes by LOC, I tell this story to a lot of people:

On his 65th birthday, an engineer retires from the company he’s worked at his whole life. He’s looking forward to doing anything but banging on widgets, and sets in for an enjoyable three decades of golf and large-print Grisham novels.

After about 6 months, though, he gets a panicked phone call from his old boss. “Engineer Guy,” his boss says, “we have a serious problem, and really need your help. Could you come in and talk?” Engineer Guy grudgingly agrees, because it’s raining and he’s out of Grisham.

Turns out that they have had a widget injection matrix go haywire, and the whole production line has been shut down for a week. They’ve tried everything, but can’t figure it out, and the company is going to fold if they can’t get things started back up soon. Former Boss says that EG can name his price, and EG agrees to take a look — again grudgingly, but he does have his pension to think about.

EG asks for a piece of chalk, and walks around poking at things for a little while. Everyone is holding their breath and waiting for his verdict. Finally, he makes a mark on part of the injector matrix and says “replace this and it should be fine”. Sure enough, the machine chugs back to life and the company is saved.

A few weeks later, he gets another call from FB. “Hey, EG, just got your bill. We’re really grateful for your help, but don’t you think $50K is a little much for one chalk mark?” “Oh, absolutely. The chalk mark is $5. The rest is for knowing where to put it.”

People really won’t mind if you ask basic questions. Jump on #developers or another IRC channel. You really will struggle to make any kind of progress without asking questions on IRC. I ask “dumb” question on IRC all the time and I’ve been a Mozilla employee for over 3 years

The main problem isn’t so much about asking where the docs are, but about knowing who to ask and worrying about getting stuck half-way to my goal and not knowing how much initiative to take before concluding I need help.

(I’ve got so many projects of my own and so little time not spent either working or procrastinating that I really don’t want to risk blowing away a week or two and then having nothing worthwhile to show for it and no idea where to go from there.)

Stephan: I don’t thinkany question, including “where are the getting started docs?” is unreasonable. In fact, just the other day I pointed out that on the front page of MDN is an image that says “Firefox for devs”. But tha page doesn’t tell you how to build Firefox or even use Firefox’s web developer tools! Short of plugging the right phrase into Google or getting the link from someone, it’s not surprising that you didn’t encounter the docs!

There are people working on making it easier to get involved, but any question is really fair game.