Announcing the Hacker School Maintainers Program (opens in new tab)

I probably could have elaborated a bit on this point in the blog post, but I wanted to keep it short. It's a good question though, and it's worth answering.

One of the surprising things we've learned while running Hacker School is the extent to which your comfort level dictates how much you will learn. To learn effectively, you need to be able to ask questions without worrying about looking stupid, you need to be able to admit when you don't know something, and you need to be able to jump into things that are over your head and know that you'll be able to figure them out as you go. Your ability to do all of these things is related to how comfortable you are with your environment and the people in it.

When I wrote about the situations where people build friendship, comfort and trust, I wasn't thinking about pairing sessions (though it can happen there). I was thinking about all the other things you end up doing when you're in the same place with a bunch of people for an extended period of time. Comfort gets built during group lunches, on the weekends, at movies, concerts, in the park, at bars, the beach, etc. Hopefully this clears things up a bit.

EDIT: "talking" -> "thinking" in the second paragraph.

In my case it's depended a lot on the other person. My closest friends fall into any combination of: 1) people I talk to mainly in person; 2) people I talk to mainly online; and 3) people I talk to frequently through both mediums. I don't see a strong inherent difference between the three categories, at least in my case; my mostly-in-person-chat friends aren't generally closer friends than the other categories. But with some people it's very hard to build more-online friendships, mostly people who, either through unfamiliarity or inclination, don't use IM or IRC in a conversational way with nuances, and treat it instead as more of a stiff/impersonal medium. With other people it's the reverse, and actually hard to build more-in-person friendships, especially with people who are much more open in text discussions than in person (common among tech people, including myself).