Hi Leif. I think this is a great idea. I volunteer to do some office hours for beginners. It would be great if some folks who have put on ClojureBridge could help pitch in an hour or two of office hours. ClojureBridge workshop attendees would be a great audience for this.
Bridget On Thursday, April 24, 2014 11:44:08 PM UTC-4, 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.
