[swift-evolution] Swift source mentorship program

[Jay Abbott]

I think that "we don't have time to implement this time-saving
project-accelerating quality-improving thing" is widely recognised as an
anti-pattern (or anti-process if that’s a thing) these days, and I’d hope
Apple would find a way to avoid this problem. :)
​

On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 at 21:44 Jacob Williams <ponyboy47 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170814/0b47814e/attachment.html>