Hello all, THE SITUATION: It was brought to my attention recently that Python users in Slack are not getting much support, because most of the Beam Python-knowledgeable people are not on Slack. Unfortunately, in the Beam site, we do refer people to Slack for assistance[1].
Java users do receive reasonable support, because there are enough Beam Java-knowledgeable people online, and willing to answer. On the other hand, at Google we do have a number of people who are responsible to answer questions on StackOverflow[2], and we do our best to answer promptly. I think we do a reasonable job overall. SO LET'S DISCUSS: How should we advise the community to ask questions about Beam? - Perhaps we should encourage people to try the mailing list first - Perhaps we should encourage people to try StackOverflow first - Perhaps we should write a bot that encourages Python users to go to StackOverflow - something else? My personal opinion is that a mailing list is not great: It's intimidating, it does not provide great indexing or searchability. WHAT I PROPOSE: I think explicitly encouraging everyone to go to StackOverflow first will be the best alternative: It's indexed, searchable, less intimidating than the mailing list. We can add that they can try Slack as well - without any guarantees. What do others think? -P. [1] https://beam.apache.org/community/contact-us/ [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/apache-beam?tab=Newest
