“Today We Learned”: What do we do at weekly, open, co-learning at Sudo Room?

every saturday from 2-5PM at sudo room we have an event called “today we learned,” open time for anyone to participate in loosely-organized collaborative learning & exploration of whatever we want.

the format is pretty simple. bring a question, bring something you’re interested in learning more about, bring a problem that you’re trying to solve (in programming or whatever else), bring an attitude of openness to learning new things and a desire to share what you know, and we all come out the other end with bigger, fancier brains filled with more knowledge.

the rules are simple:

• we follow what we’re interested in
• everyone has something to learn and we know this, so no one will be made to feel bad if there’s something they don’t understand or don’t know (seriously).
• we are generous with our knowledge but also respectful of others’ time (we give and take – and sometimes we work on our own if there’s no one there who can help)

we also have a projector set up so that anyone can show things to everyone else. if there’s something (however tiny!) you’d like to present, you can do so (we are a friendly and encouraging audience). and we frequently pass the plug to the projector around whenever anyone has something they’d like to show to the group.

here are some things that we’ve learned about just in the last couple weeks:

• CSS & front-end javascript
• node.js
• the difficulties of making a universal timeline to measure all of time in all of history & the future!
• dogecoin
• vim
• what cipherhub is!
• how to scrape html from websites
• datasets about data
• json
• a tiny bit about synthetic biology
• cool command line tricks
• neat dj tricks you can do with only a tablet computer

some of these problems were things that people planned to come and work on (specific problems creating a website, for example), but others we just started talking about and followed down the rabbit trails of collective curiosity. we take things pretty easy, but we always maintain a respect for each other’s intelligence and ability to learn.

feel free to join us any saturday from 2-5pm.