Engineering CoP: Mentoring/Help Desk Days

[mxajPrice]

Overview

In the 17 February Engineering CoP Leads meeting, we discussed how the previous CoP meetings ended up turning into a "help desk" situation. Though we would like to expand the CoP meetings to include a broader and regular cadence of activities, such as guest speakers and speed talks, we want to try to lean into the community need for "help desk" time and give it more structure.

To start, let's do an experimental help desk to see if this is worth developing and building into our CoP cadence.

Action Items

• Gather data:
  • Ask Slack channel what take-aways they want from the CoP meetings
  • Get hfla onboarding survey feedback from Bonnie and make readable
  • Identify common themes in responses
• Recruit a sr. engineer to who can best help work through the blockers engineers are dealing with
• Hold an "open work session" with recruited sr engineer and CoP
• Gather info on how many engineers attended and asked questions and general thoughts on how it went
• Conduct informal, asynchronous retrospective on Engineering CoP Slack to see what people felt went well, if they think we should continue holding help desk sessions, and if so, what changes to make to it in the future
• Review results with Engineering CoP leads and make plans to either hold or not hold future help desk sessions

Resources/Instructions

• Slack take-away results
• HfLA onboarding feedback -> feedback summary

[mxajPrice]

To get the ball rolling I sent out a feeler on Slack.

Quick survey- please respond in the thread.
What take-aways do you hope to get from the Engineering CoP meetings?

I think this will be a good first step before diving into asking about blockers. If we have orientation survey data, that would be helpful, too. I'll ask Bonnie about it at the next leads meeting.

[mxajPrice]

Quick summary of the results:

• tips/discussion for best practices development, Hack for LA and industry
• tips for best practices design
• DevOps setups
• Coding challenges discussions
• Demos of new tools
• Demos of workflows
• Cross-project learning/demos
• Discussion on git merge vs. git rebase
• TDD demo
• How to combine/split git commits to make PRs east to review
• GitHub tutorials
• Talks from industry vets
• Documentation
• Collaboration with other SWEs

Here are the results from the Slack survey.

[mxajPrice]

I created a summary of the H4LA developer survey results.

[mxajPrice]

Suggestion from nosebleeds: Have a space to list out

• specific technologies
• languages
• software lifecycle

[mxajPrice]

Asked for voluteers on Slack:
ajPrice
6:17 PM
Hello engineers! As the leads continue planning I would like to get a sense of those who have come on-board as senior engineers who would like to serve as a mentor to others. We would like the new cadence of CoP meetings to include mentorship/help desk days where sr engineers can answer questions about:
Using Git/GitHub
Best practices / workflows
Documentation
etc.
Is there anyone here who would be comfortable answering such questions and mentoring other engineers?

Volunteers:

• Judson Lester
• Adam Abundis
• Tony Delgado

[mxajPrice]

We have decided that we will start the new meeting cadence with a speaker, so this issue will be on hold until that is set up. @mxajPrice

[mxajPrice]

I am scheduling the first mentoring session for 18 May.