After doing Office Hours for a while, I’ve come to believe it is an effective way to help newcomers get past hurdles of Nix adoption. In contrast with chat or forums, synchronous 1-on-1 discussion quickly resolves XY problems. I’d like to establish a more coordinated mechanism for the community to welcome new users and provide assistance to beginners. This is meant as an alternate way for people to get help in contrast to chat/forums or other asynchronous methods.
I’m hoping to establish a community office hours program: a regular time slot (or slots) where a few mentors will be available in a video/voice call to break out into 1-on-1 sub-discussions to provide assistance with Nix-related problems, whatever they may be. I ran this idea by the mentors Summer of Nix mentors, and they seemed to like it. Of course the real trick with something like this is committing to it regularly.
Myself and any other mentors willing to do so will meet on Fridays 1600-2000 GMT at Jitsi Meet where people could meet and do initial introductions and present any issues they have. As needed, a mentor could break off into some other Jitsi room to directly help out with the issues. A side-effect of all of this is that we get a better idea of the difficulties beginners run into and allow us to improve the initial experience. While there is the potential for abuse and trolling, I’ve found that the 1-on-1 aspect creates a “price of participation” that reduces that problem; though if it becomes an issue we should address it.
Please comment below or DM me somewhere if you’re interested as a mentor or if other times would be better.
I’d be willing to mentor, but the current proposed hours are right in the middle of my work day. Of course, it will probably be very difficult to find an ideal timeslot for everyone involved. Maybe we could break the event into multiple different sessions throughout the day or at least start a when2meet to get a better idea of mentors’ availability?
Absolutely we can do multiple sessions if that is when people have availability. The above time is only a starting point and a consequence of Flox supporting this work and @limeytexan’s and my own availability. If more sessions are supportable from a mentor perspective, that would be wonderful.
Note that the European Commission expressed interest in a nix introduction. Ideally we could do some personalized onboarding for different members if you are interested.
The “when2meet” link above shows there could be a another time-slot with Domen and/or Raphael at a more convenient time for the other hemisphere. I can’t speak for them or volunteer their time.
(@domenkozar@happysalada: it seems 0630 UTC matches your schedule, feel free to announce or let us know if that will be a thing.)
I put down my availability. I am not available for two weeks coming up in the next month due to a company conference as well as a vacation the week after. But going forward I should be available about the same time most every Friday.
Last week’s Office Hours has a dozen or so participants (both people asking and answering questions). There was plenty of knowledge sharing, but everything was still very much rapid fire. My goal to have breakout sessions didn’t quite happen - perhaps it isn’t needed at this scale, or I need to do a better job managing it. Topics covered:
nixos-rebuild hanging
pkill -9 works
sha256 not picked up when trying to use hercules-ci as flake
/build/ was in an RPATH
need to look at build expression for a dontFixup or fixupPhase
In the summer of Nix, Gijs representing Digit (part of the European Commission) mentioned that several others inside the European Commission expressed interest in Nix. I told him that should they ever need a more personal hands on demo, several people in the community would step up and do 1 on 1 with the interested parties (Perhaps I over-commited there).
