[Python-Dev] Encouraging developers (original) (raw)

Georg Brandl g.brandl at gmx.net
Tue Mar 6 16:49:00 CET 2007

Martin v. Löwis schrieb:

Nick Coghlan schrieb:

One thing that did happen though (which the messages from Jeremy & Phil reminded me of) is that I got a lot of direction, advice and assistance from Raymond when I was doing that initial work on improving the speed of the decimal module - I had the time available to run the relevant benchmarks repeatedly and try different things out, while Raymond had the experience needed to suggest possible avenues for optimisation (and when to abandon an approach as making the code too complicated to be effectively maintained).

I don't know whether or not there is anything specific we can do to encourage that kind of coaching/mentoring activity, but I know it was a significant factor in my become more comfortable with making contributions. While there was no explicit management of a mentoring process, I think it so happened that committers always found a mentor. It so happened that some developer activated privileges for them (either himself, or requesting that this be done), and then certainly feels responsible for his 'student'. This automatically establishes a mentoring relationship.

Perhaps we should really try to make that notion widely known out there, opposed to others like the alleged 5:1 requirement or that it is hard to get patches into the Python core :)

A sort of announcement and some text on the website would surely help...

Georg

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