One of the joys of working on free books is the chance to collaborate with people all over the world. The Python version of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist was translated by Jeff Elkner in 2000 (plus or minus), but I never met him in person until PyCon 2013!
This year, I finally met Charles “Dr. Chuck” Severance, who wrote Python for Informatics, which started as a modified version of How to Think, but has transmogrified into a substantially different new book, which Chuck uses in his Coursera online classes.
Chuck made a short video of our meeting at PyCon:
And Jeff wrote this blog post about his work on Open Educational Resources.
It was great to meet Chuck in person, and to see Jeff again. I am grateful to them both for their contributions to the ongoing experiment (and adventure) of writing free books!