Mentors

[round crisis]

Hi there

I was just at the FP slack channel http://fpchat.com/ (if you are not part of it, it is a nice way to talk without twitter's restrictions) and we were talking about how it would be cool to be able to have mentors.
ie someone that you can privately ask some questions about how to advance in your learning of F#. This is particularly useful when you have a few ideas about how to do something but you are not sure which way to go or why

I wonder:

* Anyone else interested?
* How could we possibly match mentors with mentorees (I just made this word up, what is the correct word?)


How I think it might work?
* max 1 hour a week of mentoring via im/video (I guess it can be more if mentor enables this)
* concrete questions preferable or maybe general direction (ie follow a book or something)

What are peoples thoughts on this?

[Jon Wood]

I would definitely be on board since I know I can use some help.

Another thing that would be beneficial could be code reviews.

[round crisis]

By the way, I think most of us can mentor someone else 

[Daniel Fabian]

I would definitely be willing to mentor someone, just ask me ;-)

Btw, I think the word you were looking for is mentee.

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[Steven Taylor]

a variation might be an F# book club kind of thing... like a group of people decide together to work through a book like "Expert F#", or decide to work through a machine learning course together + use F# as the implementation language.  

You might be able to attract a few people to oversee such a group if the group endeavoured to write and publish useful tutorials on lessons learned.  There's got to be a win / win for your time poor experts.

Not much different from a user group format then except that its virtual and a little more focused.

I'm thinking out loud here as I'd like to present a language focused tutorial at a user group.  Hmmm... it could be useful to have some guinea pigs to try it out on first.  ;-)

[Steven Taylor]

this might help with the facilitation side for the direction you choose 

https://mightybell.com/

While I haven't used mightybell, I have heard good things about it, and I can vouch for the founder.  It just takes one or two good experiences to get the ball moving.  Go for it.

-Steven

[Jon Wood]

If we're all in Slack, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a private #fsharpmentor channel or something?

On Sunday, March 29, 2015 at 11:59:21 AM UTC-4, round crisis wrote:

[Isaac Abraham]

People can PM others directly in Slack – is there really a need for a separate channel? I’m not sure if you can “tag” users in slack though e.g. someone having a “mentor” tag so others can ask them for help.

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[Jon Wood]

The thing with PMing is that, personally, I'd feel like I'm bothering someone. I don't think (yet) that you can have tags for people in Slack. Probably the best thing currently is to just reach out in the main channel.

[Roundcrisis]

I agree with PMing beeing a little too invasive, maybe we can have a sort of rota-schedule going on that we announce on slack and other channels at the start of the day, and that person knows that a bunch of random people will pm with F# questions

Andrea
www.roundcrisis.com

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[Isaac Abraham]

The other idea I had was people just appending their slack username with “–mentor” or similar?

[Steven Taylor]

how to facilitate... answering random questions is different to the mentoree / mentor idea.  The benefit being (untested) fewer people to a higher standard who'd be able to teach others.  Random questions are useful but more scatter-shot

Probably need to have some form of qualification going on if it was to work.

[Andrew Cherry]

It sounds like a lovely concept, I think personally I'm probably way too prone to imposter syndrome to assume I'd be useful (or of course, maybe it isn't imposter syndrome and I'm genuinely dreadful).

Would it be lighter touch and less requiring of confidence to see it as perhaps a "pair with someone with X F# experience"? I'd always love to spend time with anyone looking for help/opinions, but I can't offer any guarantee as to the quality or value of said help/opinions...

Andrew 

[Jon Wood]

Perhaps it's just getting together with someone to seek their advice is what helps the most? I'm all for getting together with one or two other folks and going through some projects or something like that.

[Steven Taylor]

I like that this is a grass roots way that may choose to use various channels & mediums (including slack).

F# for scientists is another great book for a semi structured approach. Books are good for getting your mind out of a rut. Perhaps you could work on one book per quarter.  I'd like to see a more functional approach applied to learning with less voting / gamification. 

re: "I'm probably way too prone to imposter syndrome".  Stop being modest please Andrew.  

[Roundcrisis]

@Andrew I really like your idea of pairing. I have the similar feeling of "surely I am sooo bad at this" 

Andrea
www.roundcrisis.com

[Ross Mckinlay]

I like this idea too, and am in the same boat where I'm not sure I would put my hand up to say "I can mentor people!" as my F# code is often not exactly frame-worthy :)

[Jon Wood]

But you're definitely at the point where you could guide folks like me who have barely gotten started. I'm sure most of the people here are. :]

[Steven Taylor]

teaching can be one of the best ways to learn.

P.S. more false modesty... and this time from "where no type provider has gone before" Ross.

[Ross Mckinlay]

Ha! I can certainly give some pointers on how to not write type providers!

[Roundcrisis]

Shall we book remote pairing sessions then? It seems like a good first step

Andrea
www.roundcrisis.com

[Jon Wood]

I concur. I'm sure we'll all get better ideas of what we can do with this as we go along, as well.

[round crisis]

ok , so we just created a form so people can sign up to pair up.
We are starting it to see how we can make it work, suggestions welcome or just sign up https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DkCEohRCL04T4GnSV_qqL83pY4c1T9Y1BV1ZjfgR5AE/viewform

[Kit Eason]

I love this idea! I'll jump aboard as a mentor when I've finished recording my Pluralsight course - that's all-consuming at the mo.  Brilliant though!

[Dave Thomas]

Same here, this is a nice concept and there's a lot of fud in the world to do with functional programming.

[Mark Gray]

I love this idea too, I am actually looking for a mentor to help me work through some of my dodgy F# code :)

[Roundcrisis]

I sent the first batch of pairings on slack (functionalprogramming #fsharp ) today. I recommend you join that, would that be possible?

Andrea
www.roundcrisis.com

[Mark Gray]

I have just joined slack.

[Roundcrisis]

Awesome :)
There was 3 people left unpaired maybe you can reach out to them?

Andrea
from my mobile, excuse the brevity

[Mark Gray]

I will do so.

[Mark Gray]

I signed up on the form, but cannot see the 3 people you mentioned, most likely it is glaringly obvious....

[Stachu Korick]

Can someone send me a slack invite, please?
Sta...@stachu.net

I'm in the JabbR.NET room all the time, but no one is there!

Stachu

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 5:44 PM, Mark Gray <markgra...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I signed up on the form, but cannot see the 3 people you mentioned, most likely it is glaringly obvious....

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[Mark Gray]

go here: http://fpchat.com/

[Mark Gray]

I found the 3 remaining unpaired, will make contact at some point this week.