[swift-evolution] Swift source mentorship program

[Jacob Williams]

A Swift developer has actually started a blog series about the swift compiler. The links to his post were posted in one of the evolution topics a little while ago. The series is incomplete, but it gives a lot of explanations about the various parts of the swift compiler.

https://medium.com/@slavapestov/the-secret-life-of-types-in-swift-ff83c3c000a5 <https://medium.com/@slavapestov/the-secret-life-of-types-in-swift-ff83c3c000a5>
https://medium.com/@slavapestov/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-sil-type-use-6b45f7595f43 <https://medium.com/@slavapestov/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-sil-type-use-6b45f7595f43>

I wholeheartedly agree that a mentorship program would be extremely useful for helping others get up-to-speed with the swift compiler. I myself wished I understood it better. The only problem is that with something so large and complex, it would take a lot of time and effort to document and create a tutorial for it. I wish that this would happen, but I don’t know that anyone at Apple has the time and there probably aren’t very many people outside of apple with the know-how and time to write a tutorial as a hobby. I hope that I’m wrong though.


> On Aug 14, 2017, at 2:35 PM, Jay Abbott via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I think we should have some kind of mentorship program for the swift source. I'm confident that my following statement doesn't apply to just me:
> 
> "I'd love to get involved in the source a lot more, and my previous efforts to browse around and understand it a bit better have been thwarted by lack of time, a specific goal/direction, and no proper commitment (all my own failings of course). I'd be happy to learn the code and implement proposals, but I really want someone to turn to when I need some help and guidance."
> 
> In addition to the core team, I think there are a few others who know the code well enough, and who may be willing to mentor and share that knowledge further. Having a specific mentor makes it much easier to get to a level where you feel comfortable talking to the wider development community on swift-dev for example.
> 
> There would need to be some level of self-starting bar, which would need to be supported by some documentation to read, and some simple tasks/tutorials to complete (For example create a branch which removes an existing feature and a tutorial to re-implement it, that touches a few key areas of the code-base). The swift project and the evolution process would benefit by having more potential implementors, so writing such documentation and getting-started guides should be a high priority in order to help people get more involved. Once complete, it would be great to choose a proposal, find a mentor, and start work on it under their guidance.
> 
> I believe effort focused in this area will have a high return, given the high quality and quantity of passion and talent I see in this list.
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