
Show HN: Ask a Dev - tshedor
https://askadev.org
======
andrewstuart
"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.

~~~
ad_hominem
Don't forget the most famous one, "Why use this [Dropbox]? It's the same as
FTP or email"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

~~~
andrewstuart
Man that has to be framed and put on a wall for all entrepreneurs trying to
catch a break.

My original message could not be more strongly emphasised than by reading the
"but hey I can just use FTP" in that thread.

Here's the bit that I love the best:

"It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. "

That must be the quote of the century. DropBox is one of the MOST viral and
revenue generating ideas there was - but here on HN when DropBox is announced,
the idea killers all pop up quickly with "Hey this thing is the same as some
unix utility and won't make money".

Just magnificent.

Also classic: "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by
getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN
or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

I love this - it's such a techhead way of thinking - you don't need an
integrated easy to use product, all you need to do it type 40 arcane commands
for exactly the same thing - it's trivial!

------
modernerd
This 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-
enginee...](http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/11/14/list-of-engineers-
willing-to-mentor-you)

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)

------
cpt1138
I 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
It'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
I 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.

~~~
molloy
The "preferred" method is to use some sort of bouncer (znc) along with running
a CLI client (irssi, weechat) in a session manager (screen, tmux) on a remote
server. Weechat includes its own bouncer, and I would recommend somebody to
start with it over irssi. I only fairly recently switched to weechat from znc
+ irssi because I wanted to try weechat.el as I wasn't happy with the state of
using screen in eshell, and I don't have it as configured as my irssi was yet
but I'm happy with it. Next up, switching to tmux from screen...

~~~
Rondom
Quassel is also an alternative, for those that prefer a GUI-client

------
tekkk
A 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
Heh, 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.

------
yeukhon
I 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.

------
CodeSheikh
Would 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
We'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.

------
ForrestN
Nice 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.

~~~
harmmonica
Forrest, 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
You 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)

------
jermaustin1
I 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
Definitely would love this in NYC!

------
TipVFL
This 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.

------
SethMurphy
This 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.

------
aaavl2821
for 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

------
siquick
Any relation to the other AskADev?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015664)

------
bdjewkes
[https://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.

------
tomasien
I 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!

------
goodoldboys
This 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?)

------
criswell
I love the logo. Making something as scary as a { look friendly.

------
keithnz
I 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

------
genezeta
Apparently 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
Great catch. The site was quickly hacked together this weekend and I should've
just localized the assets. I'll fix that up.

------
snow_mac
I'll run one of these in Downtown Denver Colorado!

~~~
tshedor
Thanks very much, we'll take you up on it. Please reach out to askadevorg at
gmail.

------
badrequest
Would absolutely love to do this in Austin. :)

~~~
tshedor
Austin is prime time. Please drop a line to askadevorg at gmail.

------
btomstrem
Is there any equivalent on the east coast? I may want to join such an event if
it does exist here.

------
fiatjaf
If you want to help someone, just hang out on IRC and look for people asking
questions.

------
forkLding
Would be good if people did this for Toronto :) I'd be there constantly

------
rahilsondhi
I would be interested in hosting "office hours" electronically

------
hitekker
A simple but fun design.

------
daurnimator
I'd love to do something like this in Melbourne, Australia.

~~~
tshedor
We'd love to have you. Please hit me up at askadevorg at gmail.

------
ogdoad
After this catches on, you should also make an askadev.out.

------
welder
Will office hours be archived to prevent repeating questions?

~~~
tshedor
We don't have plans to archive, no. Our focus is on the relationships;
StackOverflow does well with uncovering repeating questions.

------
shreyanshd
Loved the logo :}

------
AznHisoka
"Can I use ES6 in a webpack file?"

Why would I use Elasticsearch 6 in a webpack file?

