So I get to pay you $30/m to work for you on projects and I get to talk to the other developers you have locked up in your forum and to listen to you do a screencast of unverifiable quality. Sounds amazing, sign me up!
My question too. Given that I can get a list of open source projects that I can work on for free with GitHub Explore[1] I am wondering what this provides me that is worth any money, not specifically $30. To take it one step further, why should I pay you for a list of free projects, when I can get paid to work on projects with other sites like Rent A Coder[2]? The list of features implies that I will effectively only get screencasts that I don't get from github repositories and depending on your language there are lots of places to get those too (ex [3]).
Don't get me wrong, I am all for monetizing, but I greedily want something if I am going to pay for it.
I'm guessing that Marc will try to curate the projects so that you learn a lot in as little time as possible. You could work on rent a coder instead but presumably on that site, most projects will be web based CRUD apps whereas I'm imagining that these projects will help you grow as a developer.
Odds are the starting code wouldn't be written in a language I would want to use for a side project (I'm picky about side projects since they're for fun after all). I guess I could start from scratch with the starting code as a reference, but then I wouldn't be as connect to the community who are all using different technologies.
Will the club be focused on web development? You're saying that the presentations will be in JavaScript but that the projects can be done in any language. Since some kinds of projects cannot be done in JS and some can only be done in JS, this seems to be somewhat restrictive.
I have ideas for the first few projects. I'll try to have very diverse ones.
This is not 100% decided atm, but the first project will probably be to implement a HTML5 Canvas game. I'll show how to implement a game loop in JS, but also in other languages. Then, drawing on an HTML canvas or something else is very much alike.
Another project I have in mind is to implement a small compiler/transpiler. Re-implement some UNIX utilities. Perhaps a web framework too...
But I want this to be guided by the community. I'm thinking of having a voting system to let members decided what will be the next project.