We know that you will have a lot of questions about how things work at omegaUp, technical and otherwise. This is a guide on how to get better answers.
Whenever you get stuck installing the development environment or reading through the codebase or wondering about how the GSoC application process works at omegaUp, please follow these steps to get your question answered:
1. Do a quick search for your question
The following resources are super powerful when looking for answers:
- Our GSoC page answers many questions about how the application process works, specially in the FAQ section.
- Message history in our #dev_training channel in Discord Server. Discord has a search feature where you can look up some keywords for question. It is very likely that a candidate has already asked your question either this year or on a past year.
- google.com is your friend. If your question is let's say related to Git, Docker, php or something not specific to omegaUp, most likely you can find your answer through google.
2. If you couldn't find the answer to your question in any of the resources from the previous point, please post a question to our #dev_training channel of Discord Server sticking to the following guidelines:
- Explain what doesn't work. Include the steps your followed, describe what went wrong and what you expected to happed. Include as much details upfront as your can. Include, if applicable, error messages, logs, and code snippets if they are relevant. This will make things much easier for people interested in helping you out, making it more likely to answer your question successfully and promptly.
- Post your question on the general channel instead of privately asking someone. The broader the audience the more likely your question will get answered and you will also help other candidates who will have the same question.
- If you found an existing thread with your question but the answer does not solve the issue for you, please reply to that thread instead of creating a new one. By doing this you will make it much easier to solve this problem for the next person who hits the same issue as you.
- Follow-up after you solve your problem. If you posted a question on slack and you managed to solve your problem, either with the help of others or otherwise, please update the thread mentioning how you solved your issue. This is very important because if you leave the question open, people will likely waste their trying to help you after you solved your issue. Also, if someone hits the same issue later on, they can take advantage of your solution if you post it on the thread.
If you want to learn more about good practices for asking question, we recommend reading this article.
It is also important to help your peers with their questions. We do take this into account when picking our candidates. We ask that you regularly read questions posted by other candidates on slack and try to help them out if you are familiar with the things they are asking about.
We ask that you avoid doing the following things:
- Do not send direct messages asking for help. Please post them in the general channel so that other people can see your question and/or the answers.
- Do not tag specific people when asking your question. We as an organization promote a culture of inclusion, please post your question in a way that anyone can join the conversation.
- Do not re-post questions. Search for your question in the message history and reply to existing threads if your question has been posted int the past.