[Opinions desired] "This week on Exercism" weekly email

Exercism
1

Back in v2 we had an email that went out to mentors that gave an update on usage of the platform, the state of the queues, etc. I’m going to bring that email back, but also include in it things from a student-facing perspective.

I’ll likely follow the same rule we had in v2 which is if you’ve been active in the last 4 weeks, you’ll get the email, then it’ll stop (so we’re not spamming you if you don’t use the site).

I’d like people’s opinions on what they’d like to see go into it. There are two guiding principles:

  • It’ll be an automated email (so it’s powered by data from the db without added commentry)
  • If can be personalised to you (based on your activity)

I’ll probably start with whatever I consider to be the lowest hanging fruit so that I can get an MVP of this out in a timely manner, but I’d like to think about how we evolve it, so feel free to be ambitious with your ideas within the remit of the critiera above.

My initial thoughts. Three categories

  • If you’re a mentor, get mentoring stats for languages you mentor.
  • If you’re a contributor/maintainer, get contributing stats for languages you maintain or have recently contributed to.
  • If you’ve solved exercises, get solving info.
  • General exercise community stats.

In terms of the sections:

  • Mentoring stats could be:
    • Solutions requested
    • Solutions mentored
    • Queue lengths
  • Maintaining/contributing stats would be a time-based subset of Elixir impact and status on Exercism
  • Learning stats would be:
    • Updates on tracks you’re part of (powered by “What’s going on with xxx” on a logged in track page)
    • A list of the solutions you’ve started, completed, published.
    • An update on your mentoring requests/completions as a student.
  • General community stats might include:
    • Blogs
    • Community stories
    • Forum stats (x posts created)
    • Update on numbers (x new users)

What else would people like?

2

Well, a lot of the info that was available in the old e-mails is now available in the new Community page, so I wouldn’t be looking for an email that duplicates that.

What might be nice is what new videos or Dig Deepers have been added to exercises in tracks I’ve joined, but I don’t feel strongly about it.

I missed getting the e-mails when we first went to V3, but I can’t say I miss them anymore. Even the e-mail that says I earned a new badge: I can see that on top of the pages. I don’t need an e-mail for it.

3

I like the idea but please make it opt-in, even with those conditions attached.

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4

The mobile experiences of the site being what it is, an email summary sounds good. I do appreciate the emails from TLDR and Console. If Exercism’ s summary is as helpful …

5

I very seldom hit the dashboard, so it is not something I pay attention to. Having the once a week e-mail to update on activity is definitely a nice “state of the union” notice for me.

6

Jeremy,
Being new to Exercism, I would like to get to know it more - so, this email idea would be great for me.

Yes - please include any videos publishes, blogs written, etc. Also an update on the Functional February and other running themes…

7

As a maintainer, I would love if I could write posts for this list (see screenshot) that are not related to a new exercise or concept (they could have some standard info icon). Then those updates could be included in the emails and people would stay informed about how the track is developing. The existing info we have in this list would also be a start of course.

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8

Yes, I would like this aswell.

9

While I agree that some of the information in the old email can now be seen on some of the new pages, I still like the idea of getting an email with a summary. It saves me from having to go through all those pages just to have a quick idea of the stats.

This is something I liked in the V2 email, because it gave me a quick idea of the impact I was having (or not) clearing the queue for some language by saying, “there were x mentoring requests, you mentored y”. Going even further, something that could be a nice addition to that would be “there were x mentoring requests in this language, there were y in total for all languages”.

Comparing the track stats to the whole of exercism could also work well here.

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