OK, sign me up.

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Grant Ingersoll <gsing...@apache.org> wrote:
>
> On Apr 12, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Benson Margulies wrote:
>
>> Robin asked me to pay attention to this mentoring question. I have
>> assumed that, to be an effective mentor here, I'd have to be capable
>> of at least keeping up with the mentee on the math behind whatever
>> algorithm is in play. Thus, absent a proposal to work on maven
>> configurations or collections, I'd classified myself as unqualified.
>> Grant's message seems to suggest that I'm wrong, but I still worry
>> that the unsuspecting victim will dig themselves into an algorithmic
>> hole from which I cannot extract them.
>
> As I told David Hall last year, "I guarantee you that you know more about the 
> math than I do." (and I have a Math degree!) since he is living it every day 
> in his studies and work.  In fact, David was as much a mentor to me on LDA as 
> I was a mentor on Mahout.  I view my job as a mentor is to help the student 
> learn the ins and outs of open source at the ASF and in Mahout.  That I feel 
> I know quite well.   I also know that implementations don't have to be 
> perfect and that they will evolve and get better over time.
>
> I also know that decisions/discussions about implementations are to be done 
> on the list even when I do know the answer (anyone who has ever emailed me w/ 
> a private question knows this about me as well) so that everyone benefits 
> from it.  More times than not, a better solution is arrived at anyway.  So, 
> for me, off-list mentoring, comes down to things like checking on progress, 
> writing recommendations, filling out the evaluation, etc. and all of those 
> things are usually minimal (< 5 hours per week)
>
> So, in other words, it is not your job to extract them from the hole.  That's 
> the community job.  Besides, just b/c the algorithm is in a hole doesn't mean 
> the student has failed.
>
> -Grant

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