One of the ways that 37Signals has made Rails such an insane PR success has been the pervasive use of screen casts to show how stupidly simple it is to get started with Rails.

Who wants to work together to do the same for Gnome? IMO, the thing keeping people from jumping in is the appearance of an extremely steep learning curve when in fact, it's not that hard to get started. Do we have the bandwidth on Gnome.org? If not, who can offer bandwidth?

Here are some topics I think would be great. These would all be under 15 minutes. Ideally, under 10.

  • Writing a patch
    • Create a Bugzilla account
    • Check out the source code
    • Twiddle some interesting looking lines
    • Compile, run, rinse, repeat
    • Creating a patch
    • Post patch to Bugzilla
  • Installing debugging symbols on a variety of distros and running a crashing program under GDB
  • Writing a Glade-based UI to do foo and bar with resources on a network.
  • Talking to gconf; installing a schema
  • GTK+ macros seen in code, macros and more macros
  • in that vein, doing i18n correctly in a new project
  • Solving a11y bugs, missing features
  • A separate screen cast for every non-deprecated library in platform: an introduction to developing with them

Again, lets just get started and do this. Istanbul is there; it works. Every Gnome user can stream Ogg Theora; no need to worry about a player, codecs, etc.