Lately we’ve had a few new people who are interested in joining development. This is, of course, awesome. Unfortunately, helping them get started has been kind of ad-hoc, because there’s not a great way to have a low-latency conversation with current developers to bounce ideas off of. None of the current developers are in IRC at predictable, consistent times, and some developers are rarely on IRC at all. Forums have too much latency and overhead for quick back-and-forth discussions. This is a non-ideal situation.

So, we’re going to do an experiment – there will be a public developer IRC meeting in #namecoin-dev on Freenode on Saturday, Jan. 3, 9AM Pacific / 11AM Central / 12PM Eastern / 5PM UK / 6PM CET. We’re going to try to have as many Namecoin developers present as possible.

Current developers will give updates on what they’ve been doing; interested new developers can use it as an opportunity to get involved in discussions, ask questions, etc.; and interested average users will get to see more of how the development process works (because transparency is good). This bears some similarity to how Tor handles things.

Remember, this is an experiment, so we’re not quite sure how it will go. If it goes well, this may become a regular occurrence.

So, if you’ve been thinking of getting involved, or if you’re just curious, now’s your chance – stop by the developer meeting on Jan. 3 and talk to us. See you there!