From: Eivind Eklund Date: 2008-05-06T16:47:25+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby mentoring On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Michael T. Richter wrote: > What I'd like to propose is a Ruby mentoring program for newcomer like luka > luka. A mentor would basically be a single point of contact for Ruby > questions. If, for example, I were to be luka luka's mentor, he would email > me with his questions and I would answer those I know the answers to and > research the answers (including forwarding the question here) to any I > didn't know. I think the problem is that people won't know when they're good mentors and not. I'm sure that if I chose to mentor, I'd sometimes give a lousy answer to a question *while thinking I was giving a good answer and had no need to do research*. In fact, psychology seems to tell us that we're most likely to think we're competent when we're not: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL As an example of this, look at the recent "Integer Regexp" thread. Apart from sharing the concern about using nil for infinity, I was fairly happy with the contribution I made to that thread. I saw it as a simple, easy solution to the problem domain, and would have felt no need to send that off to the mailing list if I was mentoring - the solution seemed obvious, and I didn't really think that there was any other relevant way to do it. Yet, if I had been a mentor and had done that, I would (A) have missed that it didn't seem to be so obvious to everybody (as several other solutions were proposed and nobody else posted the solution I gave), and (B) would have missed Ara Howard's beautiful solution based on hacking the existing RegExp engine. So, I was incompetent in that area and thought I was quite competent. And, being shown my own incompetence in such ways is what I learn most from - including seeing other people's "obvious" solutions. So, I personally feel that this, while sometimes repetitive, is one of the most productive uses of the mailing list. Eivind.