Re: Results of the "mentoring" experiment Re: Metaproblem, part 3

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Hi,

joaotavora@gmail.com (João Távora) writes:

> On Friday, I pushed darkroom.el to ELPA.git, as one of my "reasonably
> small ideas" that I setup for the "mentoring experiment" to ELPA.git.

Thanks for pushing this to ELPA.

Some quick comments, mostly to clarify João's summaries of my comments.

> * According to Rasmus, the mentoree must do some effort in this phase to
>   convincingly present the utility of his extension, and how it
>   differentiates from the rest.

If you want somebody to spend time reviewing you new, "unproven" code, you
better be ready to justify why it's going to be — or already is — worth
the effort.  Mostly everybody has got 24h-days but would like to have a
many hours more.

> * According to Rasmus, and I agree, availability and commitment of
>   mentors depends on the personal interest they have in the
>   code. Apparently Rasmus had used something similar to darkroom.el

This is related to the above.

> * Rasmus' interest motivated me to actually do the work and really clean
>   it up.

Cool.  Darkroom is bound to F6 in my init.el now.  I'll look into

> * My opinion is that this can work, but there have to be some guidelines
>   in place (like manual, CONTRIBUTE or README) so that mentors and
>   mentorees are aware of some minimal formality in their roles. It went
>   OK without it, but could go better.

It could be formalized, if you think.  I'm not sure it would make a
difference.  People give advice according to their skills and preferences
already.

> Also Rasmus prefers it to be called "peer-review".

When Stefan, David, Eli, Dmitry, Drew, Stephen, Richard and mostly
everyone on this list give advice you can call it "mentoring".  But
clearly when someone like myself gives advice, it's peer-advice.

> I guess the whole idea of mentoring is that a person with some
> experience is the best aggregator and additionally
> *provides (a lot of) motivation to clean your stuff up and contribute*.

I agree strongly with this and I think it's one of the strengths of GNU.

—Rasmus

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