Is there anything out there to help connect newer programmers with experienced programmers in GNOME or Linux in general? A big-brother/big-sister type thing. It's quite rewarding to both those learning and those with experience to help each other when they have common goals and passions. It allows for broader dissemination of information, more testers, more eyes to find bugs and a sense of shared vision.
Maybe a yellowpages of people and their interests?
Comments (10)
I would love to see such a thing…where do I sign up!?
I think that the typical point of meeting is the irc, where experienced and not so experienced people interested on a project get together.
Yea, I’d love to see something like this too. I think IRC is good for a lot of things but it’s not ideal when it comes to setting up more explicit mentor/mentee relationships.
Hi! I’m working with a few people to create a website for this, OpenHatch.
It’s a hub for showcasing the contributions you’ve made, finding new ways to contribute, leaving notes about what you like to do and want help on, finding mentors in Free Software.
So I’m thrilled you’re asking. (-:
How about you sign up at http://openhatch.org/ for an alpha account? We’ll send you emails as we progress, and you can help us make the service more useful!
Try signing up without an invite code; if it gives you trouble, email us at all@openhatch.org.
This would certainly help for someone like me. Only programmers I know are Windows, and noone else I know uses linux, forget about programming with gtk+.
Whats the IRC channel Marin?
I tend to linger on irc.gimp.net in #gtk+ #gnome #mono and such
A yellow pages of people and their interests sounds like a great idea.
IRC is horrible for people with day jobs.
Seriously, use of IRC excludes a lot of people. I’m on IRC but the immediate nature, when I can’t stop what I’m doing and deal with, it makes it frustrating.
But as for mentoring I’d encourage people to just ask on a relevant project list. I think most projects would be quite happy with this – provided the mentoring recipient makes a real effort. Personally I know I’m willing to do a lot to help people coming up-to-speed in any of the projects I work on.
User groups shouldn’t be overlooked either.
If I thought IRC was sufficient at fostering symbiotic relationships between people I wouldn’t have posted this. I’ve been able to help others better simply by them emailing me out of the blue.
I imagine only a few do that compared to those that have thought about it.
As for projects, I don’t think that is the right approach either. For example, someone might want to share knowledge with me on scalable or distributed systems but hardly wants to join another project. And likewise, I don’t want to join another project but have information I’m willing to share to help others get up to speed.
There are some project specific programs like kernelnewbies which exist, but I haven’t seen anything that covers open-source in general.