Teaching padawans to chop wood and carry water in their open source journey
summary
Mentoring programs onboard beginners through concrete steps: four students per university working three months on constrained, iterative tasks, with weekly one-on-ones and documented goals in etherpads or docs. Practical tooling includes devstack and IRC access (ZNC), paired programming for hard problems, and regular code reviews. Results show more landed patches, far fewer unfinished chores at internship end, and several interns advancing into long‑term contributors or maintainers; prefer small, visible features or client gaps over large, multi‑month projects.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:32Meet Victoria Martinez
- 2:37Mentoring in the Open Source Community
- 5:40Benefits of mentoring
- 10:34Whats our involvement
- 11:08Internships
- 11:47What weve learnt
- 13:35Themes
- 13:50Goals Objectives
- 16:48Communication
- 19:12Feedback
- 21:31Conclusion
- 21:53Getting started
- 26:09Handling expectations
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