Mentoring the Go Track

Programming Go
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Hi,

The last period of time, the queue for mentoring the go track have raised, earlier it was at max at 10 at a time, but as I write this, it’s 33 in the queue.

So if you have some go skills, it would be cool if you could go and check, it you can mentor someone. Not all reviews requires the same skill set, so there might be one that you can help too.

Thanks in advance.

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I am a bit ‘rusty’ on Go, but I have been trying to help widdle down the queue over the past few days.

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This is still a problem the queue gets bigger and bigger, I really can understand if people lose interest in learning, which is a shame.

Can we do anything to improve this? My limit go skills if from learning the track my self, so I can only mentor the basic exercises.

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Wow. That’s an impressive queue…

My Go is extremely rusty and I don’t remember many of the best practices, but I might be able to help chip away at some of the queue.

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I’m new here, I just created an account and I’m researching. I’ve been working with Go since 2017 but I have to learn how to use the platform. Is there any guide on how to start mentoring?

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Shouldn’t a request be automatically withdrawn after a specified period of time, with a notification sent to the poster? Rust currently has 211 solutions queued, most of which are over a month old.

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If someone was waiting patiently as their solution rises through the queue and really wants to be mentored, it would suck to lose their place in the queue.

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True, but this assumes several things:

  1. Mentors prioritize older requests. While some might, most mentors likely pick requests based on what they are able to process.
  2. Users are still waiting for mentoring a month later. How often is this the case? Most have likely moved on by then.
  3. Mentors will address old requests. This seems uncertain. Mentors might avoid older requests, assuming the user is no longer waiting. As a result, someone patiently waiting could end up never being mentored.
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Yup. These are all true. None the less, this can still be very frustrating if there is a user who does want mentoring and has been waiting patiently.

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Just as users are notified when a mentoring session is open, a similar approach could be applied to those still waiting for mentoring. Regular reminders could prompt them to confirm if their request is still valid. If they respond positively, their request remains active and could even be prioritized by moving it to the top. If they respond negatively, their request is withdrawn. Without confirmation, the request could automatically expire after a month or so.

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Some tracks (including D, MIPS Assembly, Standard ML, V, Zig) have mentoring requests from a year ago. Would the user then receive a reminder every month to keep the request active?

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I quite like this idea.

Instead of removing the request from the queue, we could notify them every month and let them “re-submit” the request at the front of the queue (with a single button). If they ignore it, requests over a month old still remain but:

  1. we can say with a greater degree of certainty that they are inactive.
    With this system in place, a Rust mentor for instance could take on 50 requests that are more than a couple months old safe in the knowledge that they won’t have to mentor 10 people at once.
  2. it might invite someone to reconsider whether they truly want mentoring on that exercise or they don’t care about it anymore and want to move on. Months, I feel, are enough time for a student to have learned enough so as to render mentoring on one of the early exercises pointless.
    Take an exercise such as reverse string on Rust: within a few months of learning the language, it’s feasible that they ran across iterators, implicit return and learned about Unicode. With that they would be able to come up with and stand the one-liner that is the ideal solution to that exercise.
  3. it reduces the likelihood that a request stays on the queue for many months, by bringing it to the front multiple times and letting it get more exposure. There could be a “resubmitted count” next to the age of the exercise. I predict mentors would be more inclined to take an a mentoring request that has recently been resubmitted since it implies the student has been on the website for at least a month and they are serious about the request.