[python-committers] Suggestion: A PSF grant for running a "Core Dev Mentorship Program"

[Victor Stinner]

Le 02/11/2018 à 14:19, Tal Einat a écrit :
> > I am learning that
> > effectively mentoring a developer requires being able to spend a good
> > amount of time nearly daily on such mentoring.

It really depends on the availability and skills of the mentoree. I
have mentorees who are very busy and sometimes don't ask anything for
2 weeks. Others are making good progress and ask me for help multiple
times per week. I wouldn't say daily, since neither mentorees nor me
are available everyday.

I also know that I should try to answer as soon as possible to my
mentorees, since they are usually blocked and unable to find the
solution by themselves.

Le ven. 2 nov. 2018 à 14:38, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> a écrit :
> I'd *really* like to know why that is the case.  Most existing core
> developers didn't need "a good amount of time" to be spent "nearly
> daily" on their mentoring to get them up to speed.  Instead they
> progressed slowly on the contribution curve, with due feedback from
> senior core developers, but without requiring extended attention.

Such profiles are the least common, and we already promoted all of them :-)

The trend on mentoring means that we need more core developers and
that we have to help to prevent people moving to a more responsive
project.

IMO saying that mentoring is not needed indirectly means that we have
enough available core developers to handle the 6000 open issues, the
900 pull requests, maintain the continuous integration (Travis CI,
AppVeyor, VSTS, buildbots), fix regressions, etc.

> Contributing to a large mature project like CPython requires dedication
> and significant prior experience.  If someone needs a large amount of
> hand-holding then that's a bad sign IMO.

We have documentations like the devguide, but to me it's now obvious
that it's not enough. I don't see it as a bad sign. Python is a very
mature project which has very high quality standard and a very strong
constraint of backward compatibility. Python is different from other
projects. IMHO breaking the backward compatibility in Django seems to
be easiler than in Python.

> There are much simpler and
> more approachable projects out there if they'd like to learn
> contributing to open source software.

Exactly. This is why we fail to convert volunteer contributors to core
developers. They fly away because pull requests are not reviewed,
whereas other projects are faster than us to review PRs, give better
feedback and has less strict on quality/backward compat.

Victor