I feel awesome.

We had a programming week a little while ago, and in preparation for it I searched the web for kids’ programming games and apps. I found a great list, some of which the kids have fallen in love with (and have learned loops and conditionals with.) Bryan encouraged me to put forth just a little bit more effort and make it available to others. 20% more effort and my work can be enjoyed by anyone in the world. He pointed me to the Awesome List, where people have curated the most awesome resources on every programming topic.

Github is a cool place to do it because people can contribute easily to your list in a meaningful way. They download your code, change it to add their suggestion, then ask you to pull it into your project (pull request, or PR.). When a code project is made available for free, and the community suggests improvements, it’s called Open Source. And I am an Open Sourcerer.

He wanted me to do this so I could learn about collaboration on Github and so I would have suggestions from other people pouring into my inbox about teaching programming to kids.

He was persistent, so I did it. It was not easy, but easier than expected.

The person who manages the list of awesome lists is a really popular person on Github, and the list is the third most popular project on Github. He had really strict contribution guidelines, like AP style capitalization, and including his checkbox list showing you’ve gone through all the steps. I took half an hour and made sure my list would past his tests. He merged it in like a day, without making me change anything! There are six open pull requests on his project of people who submitted something but he didn’t like it.

Anyway, now my project has 112 stars, which means that people from literally all over the world have said they liked it. Take a look here. You’ll need to scroll down and down until you get to the Learn section.