Merging the "This Is" Community into "Playful Programming"

Today marks a major milestone for open-source education: "This is Learning" and "Playful Programming" are joining forces. We are bringing two communities together to reinforce our shared goal of transparent, accessible developer education.

Two unicorn hooves high-fiving with "Playful Programming hearts This is Learning" text above it

Let's introduce each community and explain what this means for both communities.

Introducing "This is Learning" (TiL)

"This is Learning" (TiL) was originally created in 2020 by Santosh Yadav and Lars Gyrup Brink Nielsen to bring together authors and share software development knowledge.

Santosh and Lars are both highly accomplished engineers and community leaders. Both receiving multi-year awards from prestigious organizations like GitHub, Microsoft, Google, and Nx for their efforts on "This is" as well as many other open-source projects.

It's no wonder, then, that since they started their project they've:

As we migrate these resources to "Playful Programming" branding and our main website, these links may break over time. We will leave them as-is for historical context.

Throughout it all, they always remained strictly "not for profit" and encouraged cross-posting, self-controlled content ownership, and community wellbeing over all else.

Introducing "Playful Programming" (PFP)

"Playful Programming" (PFP) was started by James Fenn, Evelyn Hathaway, and myself (Corbin Crutchley) in 2019.

Playful Programming (originally called "Unicorn Utterances") started as an alternative to a bootcamp that I worked in that I felt was acting predatory to the students in my area. Knowing that James and Evelyn were all-star engineers, I asked for their help to propel our mission — of teaching others in a transparent and helpful way — forward.

Since then, we as a community have:

That last item is one I'm particularly proud of. It continually reminds (and enforces) our goals to keep our content accessible and driven towards the community; not towards profits.

Details about the merger

As both organizations have scaled, we've faced different challenges:

For TiL, they've remained focused on the content. This has meant that they have a strong repertoire of content, but have focused less on other avenues of growth.
Contrarily, PFP has developed a powerful brand, a "uniquely ours" website, and a larger community in our Discord. We're proud of what we've put out, but it does mean that our content catalog is comparatively weak.

After some discussion between Lars, Santosh, and myself, we realized that we'd be able to grow a substantially healthier community with a joint effort.

As such, we will be doing the following going forward:

Retain Playful Programming's name, branding, and structure
Keeping our board of directors as-is
Rename This is Learning's Dev.to blog to "Playful Programming" and their Angular specific blog to "Playful Programming Angular"
Continuing to run the "This is Tech Talks" podcast under Playful Programming
Reposting authors of This is Learning's existing content to opt-into reposting their content to the Playful Programming website

Again, it's that last point that we've spent a considerable amount of time enabling. Twenty TiL authors agreed for us to port hundreds of their posts to our site. This required us to develop many new features for our site, but has resulted in our site having 750+ articles present today!

Our future

But this isn't all we have planned! We also intend on:

Migrating TiL's RxJS and NgRx courses into Playful Programming's collections feature
Creating topic-specific pages to explore content of (like "This is Angular" provided for the broader "This is Learning" community)
Building out integrations with social media feeds to automatically promote authors' works

With this influx of new content and authors, we want to improve the writing experience. One concern we've heard from authors is challenges with posting to Playful's site. Today, writing a post for our site includes making a pull request to our GitHub repo. While we've tried to reduce friction with that process as much as we can, we know that writing for Dev.to using a GUI is much easier to navigate.

As such, we're working incredibly hard on building out a custom CMS for our site. Here's a small mockup preview of such:

A mockup of a post creation screen with fake images and tags

Why build out a custom CMS?

While there's a long and well-researched answer to that question, the long-story short is that we haven't found a CMS that allows our content to be stored in a Git repository with the features we want to support in the long run.

Why do you want to store content in Git?

The biggest reason for wanting to store authors' contents in Git is that it's a systemic answer to our goals of remaining maximally transparent. If our values are ever mismatched from authors', we want an easy way for authors to take their whole dataset with them without needing to access an account or API token.

And while radical transparency is our primary motivator, creating our own CMS allows us to add features in the future like:

Cross-posting to Dev.to instantly
Social media feed promotion of our authors' material
Additional components that markdown doesn't provide out-of-the-box
Revision history from the editor itself
Multi-player editing

And much more.

Thank you

Neither "This is Learning" nor "Playful Programming" would be where we are today without you; the readers.

We're excited by our next chapter as we continue to serve the community with learning materials. There's still a great deal of work for us to accomplish, but we're driven by the northern star of those that we're able to serve.

We appreciate your continued support and hope to see you in our community.

Until next time,

- Corbin Crutchley, Executive Director of Playful Programming