"Priority Document" outlining areas of greatest need for Node.js ecosystem about mentorship

[Qard]

Yep, the diag working group is quite active and I'm sure some of us would be quite happy to be mentors. I volunteer myself, at the least.

[mike-kaufman]

RE Diagnostics, we're looking at establishing a list "strategic initiatives", each with a designated "champion" to help organize & drive. See diagnostics/issues/185.

If someone wants to get involved, best thing is to look through issues, find something interesting, and ping on it. Alternatively, attend the working group meetings (generally bi-weekly, but next one will probably be 2018-06-13 due to collab summit), or reach out to me directly & I can help direct.

And, yes, we'd love to have more ppl involved & doing work. :)

[Bamieh]

@detrohutt Thanks for writing this up in great detail.

The mentorship program is in need of these "areas" to be identified in order for us to guide mentees on contributions areas of shared interest.

This initiative is bigger than the mentorship's scope since it could be beneficial to the whole node ecosystem. I believe this could be an initiative under the community committee. If you can attend today's meeting hopefully we'll have time to discuss this (the agenda is super full but this is definitely worth discussing).

nodejs/community-committee#300

[Trott]

If it helps at all, here are the stock answers I give when people ask where help is most needed:

• Windows parity. We have a much higher percentage of Windows users than Windows developers on the project, and Windows tends to lag a bit in terms of attention when tests start failing and stuff like that.

• Documentation. Unfortunately, people often think of this as an "easy" thing. I'm not talking about fixing a typo here and adding a sentence there. I'm talking about looking at the docs holistically and making them a joy to use.

• Website UX. There's an effort to redesign the website, but the website would greatly benefit from continuous UX attention.

• Build. Know devops and cloud? Great! The only other thing you need is to earn the trust of the current maintainers of the project. You can do that by contributing elsewhere and/or participating in a non-member capacity on the build repo. This is basically all about making the CI server be vastly more reliable than it currently is.

• Release. This requires even more trust than Build so you have to work up to it, but it's somewhere that we need more people because our current process burns out people quickly if they can't do it for a month and then take two months off or something.

• Automation. Less of a problem than it once was now that there's an automation team, but still, there's lots to be done there.

[bnoordhuis]

crypto, and libuv

Sorry, missed the ping. Speaking for myself, I don't have time to extensively mentor others; not beyond what I already do on the bug tracker(s).

[Trott]

As far as looking at stuff in Node.js core that needs attention, it's going to vary from person to person but my top three would be: Windows parity (again), crypto, libuv.

It's not that we don't have people working on these things. We do, and they're great. But I find these are the areas that I have the most difficulty getting timely help because the small number of experts in those areas tend to have lots going on.

Going the other direction, a big meta-ish thing someone can help with: Finding a way to make GitHub notifications manageable for all.

[Bamieh]

@detrohutt you're welcome to join when the link shows up

[codeekage]

@Trott, could we get volunteers from this small group who are experts to be on the Mentorship Team as mentors?

If we could find a way to develop folks in these areas that need more help and an urgent assistance, which actually gives the Mentorship Team a more focused purpose and also a medium to helping mentees too, then that will be super great.

I will also love if you could drop the links to this repos and probably WG champions to see how we could collaborate and make the ecosystem more Awesome.

[Trott]

@Trott, could we get volunteers from this small group who are experts to be on the Mentorship Team as mentors?

@codeekage You mean Windows parity, crypto, and libuv? I can't speak for other people's time, but I guess I can leave a ping here: @nodejs/platform-windows @nodejs/crypto @nodejs/libuv

[Trott]

What about debugging, stacktrack, logging in production?

That would be the Diagnostics working group. They used to be very active, but I actually don't know if they still are or not so much anymore. Let's ping and see if there's a "oh my, yes we'd love to mentor a few people to get more activity going here" or not. @nodejs/diagnostics

[bnb]

Gotcha. I'll add that issue to the agenda, then 😅

[detrohutt]

@MylesBorins You seem to be involved in a lot of different areas of the Node.js ecosystem so maybe you'd know this.. was there a more appropriate place to raise this issue?

All taken care of.

[detrohutt]

@Bamieh Thanks for taking the time to read it! I'd be more than happy to attend today's meeting. Do I need to be officially invited or added to an Observers list for this meeting (I know that's the process for the Modules WG) or do I just join when the link shows up?

[detrohutt]

@Bamieh Sorry I missed the commcomm meeting today. I'll be present at the Mentorship WG meeting tomorrow. Also we made some forward progress on the conceptualization of the priority document in the Security WG meeting today. I'll be opening an issue with commcomm about potentially creating a repo for the document where WG's can raise issues for things they want added/modified. Also I'll be opening an issue with the nodejs.org repo to see if they think the website is an appropriate location for the document.

[dshaw]

Ping @codeekage

[bnb]

Going the other direction, a big meta-ish thing someone can help with: Finding a way to make GitHub notifications manageable for all.

This is a big one for me as well. I'd love to use something like https://github.com/octobox/octobox but the permissions are a blocker for it as far as I know. The next best solution I can think of is either setting up something that prettily displays GitHub email notifications that are forwarded to it or loading the GitHub notifications page and apply custom scripts/styles in an Electron app or something.

[detrohutt]

@Trott Those are great, thank you! I was struggling to get things moving quickly enough to have actionable items ready for the June 1st Mentorship trial run, so these can probably serve as starting points for projects for the "beta testers" to start work on.

If they're already short on time I imagine asking them to mentor people may not be feasible, but I agree with @codeekage that if any of the people knowledgeable in these areas are interested in mentoring, they'd be a great addition/advantage to the initiative.

@bnb I like those ideas. I'd be willing discuss them in more depth in another issue or privately, and possibly try to rough out some initial implementation of something.

[MylesBorins]

Build and release are huge areas that need help as well

…

On Mon, May 21, 2018, 8:37 PM A.J. Roberts ***@***.***> wrote: @Trott <https://github.com/Trott> Those are great, thank you! I was struggling to get things moving quickly enough to have actionable items ready for the June 1st Mentorship trial run, so these can probably serve as starting points for projects for the "beta testers" to start work on. If they're already short on time I imagine asking them to mentor people may not be feasible, but I agree with @codeekage <https://github.com/codeekage> that if any of the people knowledgeable in these areas are interested in mentoring, they'd be a great addition/advantage to the initiative. @bnb <https://github.com/bnb> I like those ideas. I'd be willing discuss them in more depth in another issue or privately, and possibly try to rough out some initial implementation of something. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#38 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAecV0kKgFGovw4N9VUXK3DXVhpcRZ6vks5t013egaJpZM4TpwJ9> .

[codeekage]

Taking notes on this... Really hope collaborators from all round the nodejs project could contribute on this.

Have a collection of collaborators as mentors to help with onboarding.

[ankibalyan]

What about debugging, stacktrack, logging in production?

[bnb]

Going to remove the cc-agenda label for now, since it's been on since May 3rd and has been discussed to some extent. If there's further things that need to be discussed at the CommComm level, please don't hesitate to add it back 🙌

[detrohutt]

@bnb Actually I'd like to have some further discussion on nodejs/community-committee#322 but didn't bother trying to get that added to the agenda since I figured it more or less fell under this issue since it was already on the agenda.

[detrohutt]

@bnb as far as I know, I don't have the ability to add labels to things.