Exercism relaunched recently and is searching for elixir mentors

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Recently exercism.io relaunched with a complete new design, not only the webpage, but also the “product” if you want to call it like that.

Due to this redesign of how it works we are now searching for more mentors helping us to stand against the flood of daily submissions.

Therefore another mentor posted a small text on reddit recently, and asked me to quote it here as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/elixir/comments/995exf/exercismio_needs_elixir_mentors/

Exercism.io needs Elixir mentors

Exercism.io is a platform designed to help people improve their coding skills through practice and mentorship.

Recently it re-launched with a new mentoring feature. All the students there are guaranteed to receive feedback from a mentor.

Elixir is in the top 10 languages on Exercism when it comes to student interest. (Un)fortunately, it is disproportionately more popular to learn Elixir than to teach Elixir, thus I am calling out for your help!

If you would want to help a bunch of enthusiastic learners improve their Elixir skill, go to mentoring.exercism.io for details or ask me here.

If you need more encouragement, I wrote a blog post about what I personally enjoy about being a mentor: link.

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Just put in a request to be a mentor. Thanks for posting this! Exercism is a really neat project.

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I’ll make sure to check it out.
Out of curiosity can you be both a mentor and a student at the same time?

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Yes, you can.

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Who checks the mentors though? Is there some form of a peer review?

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Not that I’m aware of. Nobody checked me, at least.

It’s all built on trust and friendliness, it seems. I quite liked it …

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Do they require slack or so? Slack was still abhorrently bad last I tried using it, all eye-gougingly white with no way to change it… ^.^;

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I think it has gotten a bit less bad since then.

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Slack is bad, yes, but its not required. You’ll miss some direct communication if you do not use it, but important things and announcements will always be done by mail.

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Oh, you need to create an account for the workspace, and log in at least once to read some secret instructions that are only available in the slack, but no one will miss you if you never enter again after that.

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Does anyone have any idea of the backlog in the Elixir track ? None of my submitted solutions since Exercism v2 launch have been mentored yet.

I have about 20 exercises left to complete the track, so I might just as well join the mentoring side and help out.

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Last info I have is from sunday, there are about 320 submissions waiting for mentoring in the queue (core and side). Those numbers do not include legacy submissions, but only those that were made since relaunch.

And because we barely keep up with keeping this number roughly in that area, we try to get more mentors.

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I have just signed up as an exercism.io mentor.

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Thank you to everyone volunteering their time to be mentors. I’ve registered for an account on Exercism, but I haven’t done any of the assignments yet. My plan is to start going through them, once I’ve finished reading through the Elixir-related books I’ve bought.

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You can mentor while still learning.
You can decline to mentor on assignments you are not yet happy on.
Teaching is a great way to learn.

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That’s good to know! Maybe I’ll sign up as a mentor now, then. I ca help the people on the “Hello, World!” stage maybe :blush:

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Embarrassly exercism.io is currently down.

Are Rails vs Phoenix jokes appropriate here?

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They absolutely are. IMO us using Discourse on the ElixirForum is an embarassment in itself. :stuck_out_tongue: Though I cannot deny it’s pretty performant (but that might be because the server is quite beefy, as @AstonJ mentioned a few times).

A WordPress-like system and a forum system are two things that would immensly help Elixir’s popularity, although I myself am not bothered at all if Elixir gets more popular or not.

I would also apply for mentor but I am neck-deep in contract and hiring negotiations as it is. Will seriously look at it once the dust settles.

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Why? Discourse is the best forum platform out there right now regardless of the language used :023: (it’s actually mostly an Ember app with Rails on the backend).

Making a forum is ‘easy’, making a good forum is a much more difficult and time consuming. It took Discourse 3 years before I felt it was ready for a live site, same with Xenforo which was my previous favourite forum platform and which was itself and made by two of the devs from vBulletin (the best forum before that).

Having said that, if we get an Elixir forum platform that gets as good as Discourse we would happily move to it :slight_smile: (and also help test it in a subdomain too :003:).

They have a pretty good team who know Rails well. Sam Saffron and co has done a tremendous job on that front :023:

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We could still do with some more mentors. The backlog of core is now sub 24 hours, The rest less than “about 2 months”.

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