This message is aimed at people that want to *hold* office hours primarily,
but of course others can chime in with
opinions, suggestions, cheerleading, etc.
I recently held "office hours" where I chatted / pair programmed with "less
experienced" clojure programmers (some
were in fact more experienced).
Lessons learned:
1. It's fun! Do it! Online like me, or convince your local clojure user
group to do it.
2. As I expected, I was more help to less experienced people, but learned a
lot *from* the others, and hopefully
I was at least useful as a sounding board.
3. An hour is less time than it sounds.
4. If possible, test your pair programming setup beforehand (see point 3
above)
a) corollary: if someone is asking about a library that takes some
setup, it's probably best if *they* do the
setup and host the pairing session.
5. Any remote sharing software (tmux, teamviewer, etc) will mangle *some*
input. Be prepared to work around that.
6. Educate people how to cancel, and to cancel ASAP, since some will
inevitably need to.
7. For beginners (at clojure, but not programming), pick a specific problem
and work through it, or have a
solution and explain it step-by-step; that seemed to work best. Code
review of some OSS project they are
interested in might also work, I didn't try it (but again, see point 3)
8. Unfortunately, no one completely new to programming booked with me, so
others will have to give advice here.
9. Many people outside of the western hemisphere were interested, so it
would be nice to have coverage across the
globe.
Future plans:
Small plug: I used youcanbook.me to manage the office hours, with no
problems. I encourage you to use their
service, say nice things about them, and possibly give them money,
*because*:
These fine folks allow non-profits to use their advanced features for free,
or at a reduced price. So, I requested
that the Clojure community's office hours get this status. They said yes,
so my account (for now, for testing, we
can move it later) can have unlimited "team members" and "services". So,
I'd like to ask if there is interest in
setting up a community clearinghouse for giving/receiving more office
hours, possibly of more types. Some ideas
(chime in with your own):
1. General Office Hours
Basically what I did, except with more people offering office hours, so
that:
a. Any one person will only have to offer a small number of hours a week
(1, even).
b. Hopefully more coverage across time zones.
c. People can tag what kinds of programming / projects they have
expertise in, so that "beginners" picking up
clojure for a specific reason or library can have a more productive
session. E.g. some descriptions could read:
Leif Poorman
Location: Eastern USA
Languages: en
Tags: beginners, absolute beginners, web, data analysis, machine learning
Rich Hickey (obviously this is just an example)
Location: USA
Languages: en, Bynar
Tags: distributed systems, functional databases, Datomic, concurrency,
alien technology, everything else
2. Office Hours for Beginners
Specifically geared toward beginners in FP, absolute beginners in
programming, etc. This could be covered by
the description tags as above. Or this could be more of a hangout,
where a set number of beginners get led
through the ClojureBridge curriculum, or similar.
3. Project Specific Hours
a) Someone with knowledge of an open source project gives a demo of its
capabilities/weaknesses to prospective
users (kind of a technical sales pitch, but for OSS)
b) The maintainer of a fairly complex open source project walks some
people that want to contribute through the
codebase, to kickstart their contributions (I've seen this
done/proposed for Midje and Cascalog, at least).
Alternatively, we could just start with 1-on-1, or 1-on-1 and small group,
and see where it goes from there.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
Cheers,
Leif
P.S. If you are interested in holding a few office hours, email me, and we
can start testing out the more advanced youcanbook.me features.
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