Increasing your intelligence with new plone releases¶

Quite a number of people will read Steve Pavlina's blog (or they know it exists and simply hate it). He has a new interesting post about how your mind really works . The core take-away is that, in order to grow in intelligence, your mind needs fodder: new input, preferrably different from what you've already fed your mind with. That's the basis for the rest of your mind's capabilities. Quote: Push yourself to take on new input, the likes of which you've never previously experienced, and you will become smarter.

That triggered something in my mind regarding the upcoming plone 3.0 release. Reactions to every major release range from "eeeek, changes!" to "great new functionality". I'd like to make a few loose comments to let you look at the fact of a new plone release from a different angle.

• The constant evolving of plone gives you ever more new experiences. If you're doing frequent plone development, that is. And if you do it frequent enough to use a reasonable proportion of those changes. Well, great. Those experiences cost you learning time and pay you back with more input for your mind. Your programming mind is exposed to different ways of doing things, allowing it to grow and to get better at solving customer problems. More experience at different things means more stuff for your mind to work with.
• Plone evolves to something great. Every release is a bit cleaner, a bit better organised, a bit more maintainable, a bit more adaptable. For someone new to plone, the amount of new stuff will be about the same as when they would have started with 2.1 or so. Or 1.0. Only the new version ought to make more sense.
• Not everybody will be able to keep up with all the changes. Partially no problem, there's enough backward-compatibility in plone to make sure most add-on products work on two or three major releases at the same time. Partially a huge problem. You might have more new experiences than you're comfortable with or more than you can handle. Plone's add-on story can help greatly here. Limit the amount of customisations you do to the amount you can re-learn from time to time. And use add-ons for the rest. Good add-ons will span multiple major releases. (I do think almost no-one can handle all the newest zope3 + plone 3.0 + grok + whatever stuff at the same time, so everybody has to watch out for this to a certain degree.)
• More diverse experiences? Don't limit yourself to just plone. Also brush up your lisp skills for some new emacs library. Or build a simple website with Django or Rails. Delve into openplans' "deliverance" and get into xslt. All "notes to myself", btw :-)

All this verbosity is meant to give a new twist to the fact that there'll be a new plone release. Look at it from a different angle: a new experience that feeds your mind new raw data :-)