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Show HN: Ask a Dev
- ForrestN 9y agoNice work. Just a note to say I’d go twice a month if there were events in Los Angeles! I run a small tech-centric nonprofit and could definitely use this kind of help exactly.
- tapanjk 9y agoI would go if there were something similar in Bangalore.
- harmmonica 9y agoForrest, side question, does your non-profit have a website? Can you share if so? If no site, good way to get in touch with you? Been looking for volunteer opportunities in LA.
- amandamcg 9y agoYou might also want to check out Hack for LA. Community-led civic nonprofit projects. They meet weekly in the Arts District and on the Westside. http://www.hackforla.org http://www.hackforla.org
- amandamcg 9y agoLearn teach code hosts a lot of intro / study session type classes around LA, not exactly the same format but they are helpful. https://learnteachcode.org https://learnteachcode.org
- ibejoeb 9y agoI'm open to mentoring in LA. I don't have a space to offer, though.
- tshedor 9y agoIf you're interested, please drop us a line at askadevorg at gmail . We're starting in public spaces for the time being (i.e. coffee shops), so no space no problem.
- akurilin 9y agoLink?
- jermaustin1 9y agoI think this would also be great in NYC as well. And if it's registered as a true 501c3 charity, there are plenty of resources in the city to get grants and community center space for the lectures and such. This concept has amazing "franchising" opportunity.
- sotojuan 9y agoDefinitely would love this in NYC!
- tekkk 9y agoA nice idea, would have loved to have a mentor while I was coding my first Javascript mudball. Only problem I can see is clearly the human factor eg. there can be only one mentor mentoring one person at the time. (unless you're doing lectures of course) I think the biggest thing mentors can influence on is the culture of doing things and I myself have always been fascinated by the level of proficiency some older programmers have. It seems so natural to them which makes me want to try to emulate it by doing things better and learning more. Best role models I have had have been funny, cheerful and smart people who loved what they do and taken pride in doing things right.
- sooheon 9y agoHeh, I like the image of a nascent programmer coding up a little mudball of a program. Thanks for that. I agree with the mentality, way of thinking and approaching problems being one of the best things to learn from mentors. It's not something a blogpost on the latest tech can teach you.
- badrequest 9y agoWould absolutely love to do this in Austin. :)
- tshedor 9y agoAustin is prime time. Please drop a line to askadevorg at gmail.
- snow_mac 9y agoI'll run one of these in Downtown Denver Colorado!
- Arubis 9y agoI would go to this, happily on both ends of the conversation.
- bgschiller 9y agoI'm in Denver and would love to help out.
- tshedor 9y agoThanks very much, we'll take you up on it. Please reach out to askadevorg at gmail.
- monocasa 9y agoI'm in the Denver area and would be into helping out.
- cpt1138 9y agoI think IRC does half or more of this. Usually there are channels for specific things with a lot of varied experience and expertise. For instance in the #xml channel on Freenode, some very heavy hitters in the XML world frequent the channel. It also allows you to contribute back for the more basic questions that might get asked. I like the personal contact in the abstract but it suffers from huge latency (have to wait a long time for an event and my questions probably don't last that long), and doesn't scale across domains e.g. In the #drools channel, I can talk to the guy that implemented the Defeasible logic decision plugin.
- akurilin 9y agoIt's hard to overstate the value I've gotten out of Freenode IRC over the years. The #postgresql channel is chock-full of contributors and PG gurus willing to generously spend time explaining concepts and best practices. A real gem. Same thing with #clojure and #haskell . ##networking is great as well. Pretty amazing to drop into the same channel for 6-7 years in a row and see the same faces every time. One of the first things I used to teach devs on our team was how to ask questions on IRC to get the answers they were looking for. When you're working with niche tooling, building personal connections and relying on the community becomes irreplaceable. Wish people IRCed mode, wonder what the trend with that has been recently with Slack taking over.
- komali2 9y agoI still am not sure the best way to "IRC," I remember back in the day having it running in a program on Windows but lordy knows what the "preferred" method is now. I've noticed that StackOverflow now has a chat feature which is very IRC-ish and relatively helpful, if a bit empty at times.
- arca_vorago 9y agoI prefer command-line irc from a vps, I use erc because I'm an emacs fella, but I've enjoyed irssi as well. Don't forget to cloak whenever possible!
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- SethMurphy 9y agoThis reminds me of a strong meetup in (at least) New York City called Hacker Hours. It's a great welcoming community that has nurtured a lot of people new to technology. The meetup itself is not very structured in an almost perfect way for a lot of people. It provides an intimate yet very public experience for people to learn in a very safe and open space. The pay forward mentality really helps communities like this stay strong and is critical.
- modernerd 9y agoThis is a great start — finding good mentors is too hard. My favourites so far: 1. Stephanie Hurlburt has a list of developers willing to mentor others: http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/11/14/list-of-engineers-willing-to-mentor-you http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/11/14/list-of-enginee... Some resources from that list: - https://ishansharma.github.io/twitter-mentors/ https://ishansharma.github.io/twitter-mentors/ - https://mentorlist.herokuapp.com https://mentorlist.herokuapp.com 2. I've used and enjoyed Codementor's “find an expert” for paid help: https://www.codementor.io/experts https://www.codementor.io/experts
- genezeta 9y agoApparently the CDN (media.licdn.com) used for Nichole Barret's avatar is blocked when tracking protection is enabled. Just FYI, if anyone related to the site reads this.
- tshedor 9y agoGreat catch. The site was quickly hacked together this weekend and I should've just localized the assets. I'll fix that up.
- criswell 9y agoI love the logo. Making something as scary as a { look friendly.
- shreyanshd 9y agoLoved the logo :}
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hitekker 9y agoA simple but fun design.
- welder 9y agoWill office hours be archived to prevent repeating questions?
- tshedor 9y agoWe don't have plans to archive, no. Our focus is on the relationships; StackOverflow does well with uncovering repeating questions.
- tomasien 9y agoI never would have become a functional program if someone had sat down with me regularly for 3 months to think through these types of problems. Learning how they thought about them and debugged them made becoming self-taught so much easier. This is great!
- daurnimator 9y agoI'd love to do something like this in Melbourne, Australia.
- tshedor 9y agoWe'd love to have you. Please hit me up at askadevorg at gmail.
- fiatjaf 9y agoIf you want to help someone, just hang out on IRC and look for people asking questions.
- AznHisoka 9y ago"Can I use ES6 in a webpack file?" Why would I use Elasticsearch 6 in a webpack file?
- CodeSheikh 9y agoWould love to see a chapter in NYC maybe with a more broader languages and frameworks. For example say I am currently struggling with Spring Boot framework and Stackoverflow.com is a good place to tailor my question there but sometimes we don't necessarily get our questions answered in a timely manner there. Having someone who has plenty of experience with Spring Boot could guide me on the right direction. Sure I can always hire a freelancer for his/her time but this might seem an overkill for just a question or two. Indeed a welcoming solution. Come to NYC as well.
- tshedor 9y agoWe've gotten a number of requests for mentors in NYC (and Boston) but no mentors yet. Please holler at us if you're on the east coast.
- aaavl2821 9y agofor people self learning there are a lot of resources to solve problems / make things work / advance along the "correctness" spectrum, but the resources for beginners around deployment, testing, devops and design / refactoring best practices are not quite as good, at least from what ive seen. reading and understanding stack overflow examples or the docs is one thing: you can know what the code does and play with it yourself to get the right answer. but when i'm trying to refactor my spaghetti code because i had no idea how confusing stuff gets when programs get bigger or how to structure stuff, or when im trying to figure out the best way to configure or deploy an app or manage dependencies, the only resources are often blogs -- which are generally amazing and which im very grateful for, but can have conflicting advice, be tough to understand, assume knowledge that i dont have. from my limited experience even the docs are not that helpful when it comes to stuff like how to scale or structure apps, as they assume a lot of knowledge and arent as thorough as when describing core functionality. having a human being help wade through this would be super valuable not saying im not incredibly grateful for all the blogs and online resources out there, the educational resources around software are incredible and ppl are so generous w their knowledge and time. just trying to say that for ppl like me who are just getting comfortable with docs, googling, stack overflow etc but dont yet feel they can manage an app "in the wild" yet, this would be a great resource
- forkLding 9y agoWould be good if people did this for Toronto :) I'd be there constantly
- goodoldboys 9y agoThis is fantastic. We need more mentorship in software development. If there's interest, I'd like to start a north/east bay meetup (maybe Berkeley would be a convenient meeting point?)
- andrewstuart 9y ago"Hey why use this? It's the same as Slack?" "Hey why use this, it's the same as IRC?" "Hey why use this, it's the same as a mailing list?" These are the sorts of things people say to lazily kill any new idea. "Hey why use this new fangled 'google.com'? It's the same as Alta Vista." "Hey why use this new fangled 'google.com'? It's the same as grep." People say this stuff because it makes them feel smart. Folks, not all software that allows people to communicate via the Internet is the same.
- ensignavenger 9y agoOr maybe they are curious about what differentiates it? Maybe they are asking questions to learn more about the motivations behind the project? Maybe they don't know why they would want to use it, so they are asking to see if they are missing something. There are lots of reasons why people might ask the same question. Just because you might ask those questions to feel smart, doesn't mean that everyone else asking them is doing so for the same reasons.
- codingdave 9y ago> People say this stuff because it makes them feel smart. Or because they really don't see any new value. When launching a new product, it isn't the general public's job to get on board with your vision. It is your job to communicate the value in a way that connects with your audience, and makes them want to use your product.
- dvt 9y ago> Or because they really don't see any new value. Value is a misnomer. There's no inherent value in 90% of the stuff that blows up. What's the "value" in Facebook? It's even hard to see today, think about how hard it was to see in 2006. "Value" is the same nonsense idea as "solving a problem" that startup wantapreneurs are so obsessed with -- what problem did Snapchat really solve? What problem did FB solve that Myspace didn't? What problem did Google solve that Yahoo didn't? Sometimes it's just about being different (Pinterest), being controversial (Snapchat), being novel (AirBnB), and having fun (reddit). Sometimes it's about cleaning up UX (Facebook), or making things just a bit easier to find (Google). But above all, it's about the right place, right time, and right execution. Fortune favors the bold.
- rahilsondhi 9y agoI would be interested in hosting "office hours" electronically
- bdjewkes 9y agohttps://codeselfstudy.com/ https://codeselfstudy.com/ is a similar concept of a broader scope. The group meets twice a week, and draws a nice mix in backgrounds. Attendance numbers are usually in correlation with the available space (usually cafes). [edit]: primarily based in the SF east bay.
- yeukhon 9y agoI had been to some NY local meetup like this before. That didn't work out well. AFAIR, probably two or three devs would be there to help answering questions like "how do you do this in Django" sort of thing, since a lot of people found face-to-face help valuable. So what didn't go well even when there was a low volume of seekers? Say there was only five people seeking help, and two volunteers to help. If someone had a "good" question, the helper could be stuck by the seeker's side for a while. 1-1 model would be nice. If you were a frequent seeker, you could build a bound/friendship with a helper, so that helper would more likely come to help you since he/she would be familiar with your questions already. See the problem there? Then for the newcomers, they came in finding themselves lonely in the corner, desperately trying to get someone to help. Eventually I found some helpers like to spend time have causal talk with certain seekers, while spending much less time on others, which was very unfair to those who came to seek help. IRC has both noise issue and focus issue. Too many chitchats going on in the background, and too many people trying to answer the same question (which is a great to see people are happy to help), but all end up arguing. So sometimes, I just message privately to keep the conversation healthy and productive. Either way, for quick questions like "how do you do this" or "what does this error means", IRC/Slack/Discord/Stackoverflow works fine. Face-to-face is a better option for as long as there is an adequate helpers available and when helpers are discouraged from causal talk to avoid the Dining philosophers problem.
- TipVFL 9y agoThis is pretty cool, I like the overall concept and spare design of the website. I do have a few notes about the user experience. I'd suggest making the current city more obvious. I spent my first minute looking around trying to figure out how to choose a location before I noticed the small, low-contrast text next to the events that says the city name. It also took me a minute to figure out if the people shown were the people running the event in my town or the people who run the website. Oh, and the "+see more" button for their skills was annoying because for most of the people it only revealed one more skill and didn't really save any room. I think you should reserve that control for people with truly long lists of skills.
- keithnz 9y agoI like the concept. But I do like when I use capital i when I refer to myself. I don't know why they don't like capitals. I'd be interested in one here in Auckland, NZ
- floogtheunfound 9y agoCurious that the initial mentor list is comprised of almost exclusively web-devs.
- siquick 9y agoAny relation to the other AskADev? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015664
- ogdoad 9y agoAfter this catches on, you should also make an askadev.out.
- btomstrem 9y agoIs there any equivalent on the east coast? I may want to join such an event if it does exist here.