Twisting the Planet

As Steve blogged the other day, we've been jamming on some Twisted lately. But it's not the kind of thing you usually hear from us. We're not doing something esoteric and mind-blowing. We're doing something much harder: working out how to bring Twisted to the masses.

The motivation for this is philanthropic: we believe in Twisted's goodness :-) As Allen Short paraphrased on IRC the other day after listening to MIT entrepreneur Raffi Krikorian "it sounds like he's saying Twisted makes you smarter." Humor aside, Allen is right. Twisted does make you smarter: with increased familiarity and experience, you start thinking outside the box. Twisted helps you become a more creative problem solver.

In particular, we're reviewing the "Teach Me Twisted" open space session we had at PyCon. A bunch of you showed up for it, and the energy in that room was just phenomenal. 30 minutes after the session, people were still talking excitedly about what they were learning or how they were using Twisted or just sharing their love for the code :-)

For those of you that missed it, Steve Holden was the headliner while Alex Martelli played impromptu co-star. The humor and enthusiasm from these two was just incredible. Glyph, Itamar, and Chris played educators while JP, Zooko and I handled one-on-one questions in the audience. There were more players, but you get the point: it was a highly dynamic, lively and fun experience. Folks were so jazzed that conversations that night lasted long into the wee hours of the morning.

After almost two months' worth of post-PyCon follow-up, we're finally getting around to comparing notes. My biggest concern is for the absolute new-comer and the lack of intuitive and useful metaphors that would help aspiring Twisted users grasp the event-driven concepts of our code quickly. Steve and I are both interested in establishing a Proper and Good motivation for using Twisted. My girlfriend, who has a Masters in anthropology, was also there. Thanks to her insight and background, she has a completely different perspective of the community (and the new-comer dynamic at the session that night) and has some completely unique ideas for crafting a new generation of tutorial materials.

We're just getting started, but it's quite exciting. We expect to have more thoughts to share on the matter... in the form of materials as well as potential news items.

One last parting thought: despite the rumors and well-earned reputation to the contrary, Twisted coders are not exclusionists: everyone's invited to the party. We're just trying to make it easier to get there :-)