For the in-person variety, I've written up some thoughts on why office hours are a good format for meetups, and ideas on the underlying processes: http://blog.factual.com/clojure-office-hours.
On Thursday, April 24, 2014 8:44:08 PM UTC-7, Leif wrote: > > 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. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
