Anyone on this list with an inclination to mentor high school app developers?

[Jeff Elkner]

Dear members of the dev-webapps mailing list,

I'm a high school / community college IT / CS teacher in Arlington,
Virginia. A free software activist for more than 20 years, I was
waiting until something like Firefox OS came along before jumping into
mobile app development.

I have two very bright high school seniors who have reached the point
in their education where this very little I can teach them. I'm
looking for an FXOS app developer who finds it fun to teach others.
The two young developers are working on developing apps now, but they
would benefit greatly from an experienced developer who can answer
their questions, look over their code, and help guide them as they
develop their craft.

I am committed to contributing to this effort in the follow ways:

1. Funding a "Summer of Code" internship for one of the young
developers to create an app for FXOS.

2. Working with the two students for the remainder of the school year
to document their learning process and the apps they are creating.

3. Using the materials the students create as resource materials next
Summer to develop curriculum materials for other students to follow in
their footsteps next year.

Please let me know if there is any on this list who has an "itch to
teach" who would be willing to mentor my bright young charges.

Thanks!
Jeff Elkner
Arlington Public Schools

[Kumar McMillan]

Hi Jeff.

That's pretty cool! Since it sounds like they already have some ideas for what apps to make then they could benefit from some code review and perhaps also support when they get stuck. I'd be happy to review their code as I have time for it. The best thing would be to have them use public GitHub repositories and have them create pull requests from temporary topic branches. In the pull request, they can mention my username, @kumar303, when they have working code ready for review. This is typically how we collaborate at Mozilla so I wrote about how to set up topic branches for this kind of work flow: https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2011/11/21/git-using-topic-branches-and-interactive-rebasing-effectively/ The lifecycle is like this: 1) create a pull request for a small feature, 2) get feedback through code review, 3) make changes based on feedback, and 4) merge the pull request into the master branch.

As for getting support when they're stuck, the best thing is to reach out to the community. The quickest path to a solution is probably to post a question on stack overflow and tag it as firefox-os related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/firefox-os They could also post messages to this discussion list for questions related to app development.

On a personal note, I'd love to see some apps (even just experiments) that accept in-app payments via this library I'm working on: https://github.com/mozilla/fxpay It's very new so not many people are using it so there are bugs we have not yet discovered!

-Kumar

>
> Thanks!
> Jeff Elkner
> Arlington Public Schools

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[Kumar McMillan]

That post I linked to is actually a little out of date and focuses on rebasing which is not necessary for them. The official guide on using pull requests for code review is better: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/

[Jeff Elkner]

This is great, Kumar, thanks!

The two students, Finn Cardiff and Alex Hirschberg, should be on this
list already, so they should be seeing both your email and my reply
(I'll do my "teacher thing" and get on them if they didn't ;-).

They already have their first app, LibriFox, in a github repo. I'll
see the two of them on Monday and make sure they follow up with you
directly.

Thanks for your help!

Regarding the testing of your in-app payment library, all the work
they do for me will be free software, but perhaps you could interest
them in doing something outside of that context with your library.

Jeff