Let's build it ! ---Draft

With the next round imminent, I want to throw up a Draft and get feedback and suggestions before locking in a Grant Proposal.

Last Month @olizilla kindly proposed a parental leave grant for me. Out of that conversation came a suggestion that I could mentor some people in development

The Idea: Mix enables you to learn and build things you're excited about in the scuttleverse.

Q: What will you do?

Pragmatic question, here's a bullet pointed list of things I think I'll do :

• teaching
• pairing
• code reviews
• filling in documentation just ahead of you
• mini tutorials
• twitch streams
• improving the building blocks for you to play with : patch-core, patch-who, patch-profile, patch-friends
• sensing

Q: uhhh, what is sensing?

It's paying attention to things around you, which helps respond to emerging needs. I've got a background in teaching, and have a bunch of practice in supporting people to do awesome things.

pregnant pause

I feel uncomfortable about this - new zealanders would rather die than talk about things they've done well - but things which I've helped exist include :

• patch-drafts - when I notice features which the community want, and that would be acheiveable I leave breadcrumbs, and when @cryptix picked them up, I reviewed his code and helped it get merged into the ecosystem.
• patch-books - similar story, except building on the excellent work of @piet with patch-gatherings (I also encouraged piet to build that, and was one of a few people who helped think about some of the patterns)
• ssb-chess - I noticed @happy0 was building a thing, so I installed it and tried it out, helping provide some of a feedback loop. I helped answer some small questions. Basically I was a cheerleader. I'm pretty sure he's at a point where I can be learning things from him now ! (same is true of piet with gatherings)
• Patchwork dark (theme) - @alanshaw was building that, but it was unclear how it would be supported, so I build out a settings page for Patchwork, which would make it easy for the two style sets to co-exist, making his work easy to merge.
• Getting started in ssb can be hard. Some new people were talking about this , so I made a couple of very rough videos (inspired by @paul) to try and patch holes in documentation and demonstrate the development flow of patchcore apps.

Note I'm not meaning to claim the success of others work - in all these cases others did the heavy lifting. I am claiming the power of the small catalyst, the community member who helps you get things over the line, who connects you to the infomation you need. I think it's subtle but incredibly important work.

This is my strategy for growing the ecosystem

I do all this part time. And it sucks when I have to delay helping people because I've got to do contract work, or hunt for work. Put me on this fulltime (or even part time for a couple of months), and let's get pumped and build all the things together

Where to from here

I would love feedback on what I've just pitched.

• did it makes sense ?
  • what didn't you understand?
• do you think this is a good way to grow the ecosystem?
• is there something you think I'd be better at?
• if you know me, did I fail to mention important things about me / how I work ?

Mix was a fantastic mentor (and cheerleader, haha :P) when I was just beginning to explore scuttlebutt and start work on ssb-chess.

His enthusiasm, writing and support is part of what made (and continues to make) scuttlebutt and building stuff for it exciting to me =]

I think it'd be fantastic if we could fund him to continue doing the great job he's been doing (and be able to allocate more time to it.)

Also, I know what you mean with regards to it being uncomfortable to talk about things you've done well. Scottish people have the same difficulty with this :P

In fact, I'm writing another proposal at the moment and feeling the same thing!

@happy0 I'm half scottish D:

I love this. I've noticed you several times saying "we could do with x - this would be a good project for someone without much experience. If you want I'd be happy to mentor you on it" or words to that effect. This has inspired me to make a start on (configurably) showing icons for likes instead of ticks in patchbay and the videos you made have really helped me start to make sense of the code (I was completely floundering before).

So, first of all, thank you.

Second I think it would be great for the ecosystem if you had the freedom to dedicate yourself to this for a month and I like hearing that it would be good for you as well. I would fully support this proposal.

December Grant proposals are presumably going to start soon.

Thanks for the encouragement and support above.
Update would be I would probably do the work over 2 months - December + Janurary.

Final question : Did anyone have any challenges to throw me around my proposal?