We learn so many new things at our Johannesburg Drupal user group meet-ups. But time is short at the meet-ups and it takes (me) a few weeks to assimilate the new tech and get to use it.
If you guys would like to try it, perhaps we can have IRC sessions in #drupal-sa to share the new knowledge. Maybe also a bit more along the lines of small chunks and specifically making them useful in everyday current Drupal development workflow.
I try to help a lot of people over IM (Google Hangouts and such) and the most frequent problem I run into is in setting up a dev environment just to get started on the (relatively) new tech. For those on Linux things are very easy, but for those on Macs I'm unfamiliar with the OS and so far always run into problems. The ones on Windows usually just install Linux Mint (so far only one remained on Windows duel boot, the rest simply switched completely and mostly painlessly).
With that in mind I have three or four initial sessions in mind:
1) Switching to Linux (just a few pointers on how to switch). Making a list of your business-/work-critical programs, making sure you have them running and use them for a week in a VM only. Knowing you're good to conduct your business or complete your work using the VM only, switch to Linux and as a priority get the VM up first. You'll then be able to work well and slowly familiarize yourself with how much more you can do on Linux. This should be a fairly short IRC session, with loads of questions to address uncertainty ;-)
2) Setting up a basic first dev stack (very basic). We'll just get LAMP up for you and get a local Drupal Remix site up that we'll use to do a bit of dev on to demonstrate the new stuff.
3.1) Install git, node.js and ruby >=1.9 on Mac
3.2) Install git, node.js and ruby >=1.9 on Linux
4) Install and use: Gemfile, Gruntfile in the zen sub-theme that comes with Drupal Remix. This will get you as far as being able to edit Sass files and while you edit, say, a colour in your text editor in an SCSS file, have just the colour livereload change in your browser window.
Of course that will just lend itself to the concept demonstrated. Once you get to grips with this, there's much more you can do with this and we may have future sessions to either repeat the above or add new cool things like:
Using the above to automate tasks for your whole Drupal project (not just the theme). Creating single page apps with other new tech like Angular JS and tie that back into your Drupal website for a data store. Using helpers like Yeoman to scaffold out a new project so that you do not have to go download all the component parts and place them in just the right places to be able to use them.
I'm also still new to all this, so while I may have been using Sass/Compass etc. for months, I've only used grunt for a short while and I'm still, right now, only getting my first AngularJS app ready to replace http://topdrops.org with.
Time and Interest
If you're interested, please use my contact form to contact me or reply on this post below. I'd especially like to know what times would be the most convenient for everyone each week.
Thanks
Finally, I'd not know the half of this if it was not for Ivan and the Drupal People that attend and speak at the Johannesburg meet-ups. You guys saved the meet-ups and bar one night, they have been without the commercial take-over that plagued them from the drupal.co.za stuff before. Awesomely dedicated to information and skill transfer!
As we gear up with the Drupal Association South Africa, we may look into formalizing some of the online sessions (also if they seem to work out) on IRC and as soon as we have our banking and such sorted out, will start making plans to fly to the other South African Drupal user group meet-ups to share the stuff we learn at the Johannesburg meet-ups.
Please answer: Your preferred time to meet in IRC #drupal-za for two hours.