On Apr 12, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Benson Margulies wrote: > Robin asked me to pay attention to this mentoring question. I have > assumed that, to be an effective mentor here, I'd have to be capable > of at least keeping up with the mentee on the math behind whatever > algorithm is in play. Thus, absent a proposal to work on maven > configurations or collections, I'd classified myself as unqualified. > Grant's message seems to suggest that I'm wrong, but I still worry > that the unsuspecting victim will dig themselves into an algorithmic > hole from which I cannot extract them.
As I told David Hall last year, "I guarantee you that you know more about the math than I do." (and I have a Math degree!) since he is living it every day in his studies and work. In fact, David was as much a mentor to me on LDA as I was a mentor on Mahout. I view my job as a mentor is to help the student learn the ins and outs of open source at the ASF and in Mahout. That I feel I know quite well. I also know that implementations don't have to be perfect and that they will evolve and get better over time. I also know that decisions/discussions about implementations are to be done on the list even when I do know the answer (anyone who has ever emailed me w/ a private question knows this about me as well) so that everyone benefits from it. More times than not, a better solution is arrived at anyway. So, for me, off-list mentoring, comes down to things like checking on progress, writing recommendations, filling out the evaluation, etc. and all of those things are usually minimal (< 5 hours per week) So, in other words, it is not your job to extract them from the hole. That's the community job. Besides, just b/c the algorithm is in a hole doesn't mean the student has failed. -Grant
