Starting a community from scratch

One of the most difficult things I have found when starting to learn anything new is doing it in isolation. Without a community to learn with, my enthusiasm can wane.

Kathy Serria, a great blogger, once posted a graph on her Creating Passionate Users blog shown below.

When starting to learn something new I want to get above the “I suck” threshold as quickly as possible and then move towards the “I kick ass” threshold. Without feedback of a community of people I can end up on the dropout curve.

For a number of months, I’ve been trying to learn functional programming by learning the Clojure language. It has been slow going. I feel like I am on the dropout curve. To that end I have created the Glasgow Functional Programming Group to find other people looking to avoid the dropout curve and support each other towards being kick-ass.