 Okay, so, okay, I actually started on this. So this is the forum. All of the, be patient while I actually get this mouse over to the corner. The mouse is really difficult. The mouse is like, whoa. Yeah, it's like 1993. Yeah. Okay. So if you go to the Bioconductor YouTube channel and just like Google YouTube Bioconductor, you'll find the Bioconductor YouTube channel. And if you click on playlists there, you'll see the developer's form is the second playlist that's currently, that's actually there. I would actually go and do a live click to this, but I don't know if this is wise with this mouse. And that basically has like these monthly meetings. Also, if you go to the Bioconductor calendar on the events and you can subscribe to this, it's a Google calendar. So just subscribe, it's the easiest way and then it just pops up. We never, at least I never remember to go to the website and check it. I just have it, I just subscribed it. Basically, it's, I think it's the, the second Thursday of every month, isn't it? And at the moment, Mike Smith is the guy who organizes that. And he would very much appreciate if somebody else wanted to help organizing the developers forum meeting. So it's a great opportunity to keep recently developed packages or anybody just to talk maybe about problems that they're having, things that they've found useful. It's an open kind of discussion for developers. Okay, so other things that are available. So we recognized kind of the developer section of the website is maybe not the easiest to develop. So we're redeveloping that and this is very much work with Kevin who should be on the online call. Kevin, are you online? I am here, I see myself. So I don't know if people can see me. Yeah, we can see you now. Cool. I try to, okay. So Kevin, so Kevin basically created this contribution stuff by a conductor.org, which is much, I really do want to kind of show it, which is much more, yes, it is working, which is much more extensive. And hopefully, you know, you can go to the GitHub, you can edit this page, you can find out something that you think would be useful to have there, please suggest edits to this as well. But this is hopefully going to be a better landing spot for new developers. We're also using this within the mentorship program and we hopefully have more information there for developers and questions that they may be having. So hopefully this will kind of take over from that the other sites are supports them at least. The developers forum I mentioned, I'm going to mention the mentoring program in a second. Hey, so the, oops. The mentorship program is something that we just started this year. We're literally like, Kelly is one of the mentors on the program, Nitesh and Marcel who are also here at the meeting or other mentors on that program. I don't know, I'm Celestyn, sorry, Nitesh is. And the idea is that we pair new people who basically have something on GitHub but want to get it into Bioconductor and we pair them with somebody who's experienced. And anybody can apply to be a mentor. The criteria we kind of used was you had to have two packages in Bioconductor. So somebody who had experience of getting packages in. And then the mentees applied to join the program. We did review kind of the code that mentees had on GitHub if it was really not at all and anything remotely resembling R for the complete mix of languages all over the place. We kind of pointed them to maybe start here and you're not really ready to start beginning to put something into Bioconductor. But as long as it looked like it was, maybe had the semblance of becoming coming like in our package, we accepted them into the program. And then the, do you want to talk about that actually is how you've been finding it? Yeah, yeah. I think this program has been really great actually. So we didn't have that many, maybe like a dozen people signed up to be mentees. And then all of us sort of went through and looked at the different projects and basically said like, yeah, I think this one's a potential for the program. This one's maybe not quite there yet, like you said. And it's been, I think really great from the mentee aspect because they get personalized attention. They get all their questions answered and just having, you know, seeing the progress over the course of the few meetings that we've had with them and I think it's been really helpful. So a big fan. Yeah. And so this is like, we're just trying and this is the first time. And so we're hoping that our mentees can get packages into the October cycle. And then the plan would be to kind of really like meet with everybody, learn from this first cycle and hopefully begin another cycle in probably September, Kevin, to probably do a call for people then to start with for the... I think that was open for discussion, really. I was looking at the... So we do have an open forum. I'm gonna dig up the link again now, but so there's a rolling call for new mentees and so I can see five of them at the moment. So we are sort of balancing the number of mentors and mentees, always welcoming people who are willing to give their time. But yeah, so we haven't sat on a date yet for the next role, but I think that's gonna be our next discussion point. And as soon as new mentors become available, I guess that's one of the limiting factors at the moment. Yeah. So if people want to... Yes. I was just wondering if you could just remind how the mentees are... How you let mentees know or anyone, how you let them know if they can apply to be a mentee, because it wasn't clear to me how mentees can... So we have a Google forum. I can put the links on this. It's on the website. Do I have the link here to the website? That would be... It's also... Do I have the link to the website? That's a really useful thing if I had it. Nope, I'm looking at all the other pages here and I'm going the wrong way around things. No, I don't have a link to the... If I go to kind of the front bioconductor website page here... Okay, we go into the developer section. It's actually linked from here. Okay, get me there quicker, please. I think I... I mean, if you're looking for the application for the mentee... Yeah, it's a new developer's program. That's it here. Okay. Yeah, and so on the new developer program here, we actually have Join as a Mentor, Join as a Mentee, and we've got two Google forms there. And we just basically... We have announced on the support site and on Twitter when these have been opened. At the moment, the mentees is on a rolling form. We probably should have the mentors on a rolling form as well, but we kind of did... We did a call. We reviewed the applicants to the mentorship program and then we closed it, but maybe we should reopen that again soon to get the next set of mentors in. And I think we also want to probably have a meeting first and just learn from everything and the experience and the existing mentors, I think are really going to guide us on how we move forward with that. Oh, is the program strictly for just all the packages or is there interest in expanding it to other developers? For example, do we all have to use cloud resources, something like that? I hadn't thought about that. Literally, we were just thinking of getting packages from GitHub into Bioconductor, and that was the focus of this. But that, I think, would be... I can see using cloud resources is something that a lot of people have a lot of questions about. So that may well be... I don't know if that's something that would be better on the developer's forum, but maybe then mentorship for that might actually be a good... I don't know, what do people think? Vince, what do you think? I like the idea. This is a feature of the project that I think has always been very important, but does not get tremendous publicity. It's an educational project, as well as a software repository. So writing papers about the scope of it, understanding from the mentorship process, which I assume includes a lot of recording of changes in GitHub repositories, right? We can start to learn about the patterns that people got themselves into and then got themselves out of by being mentored. I think there's a lot of scope for developing data and metrics that would ultimately lead to a more efficient path into the system for anybody who wants to get in there. What Alex is proposing, I think, is going outside of that, not talking about packages anymore, we may be talking about a strategy of using data resources that would ultimately help packages, or we may be thinking about something which orchestrates multiple packages in a workflow in a way that's good when we are using the cloud or in a much changed computing. I do think that there's like, for people like myself, the dummies guide to the cloud would actually be, and getting it up and started by a conductor. Even though I've attended lots of these workshops, I still, I'm a bit unhesitant on stuff. So I do think it would be a really, really great thing to do and to have, yeah. And at different levels of work to come in at, but yeah. I would volunteer to do that. And also even like for the mentorship program, something like you have a package, but you wanna do something to be able to scale it to the cloud, like so that you can add some cloud scaling in your package, something like that, that might be more related to packages, but still needing some cloud infrastructure. Yeah, so that's a great, let's... It's certainly be a good topic for a talk on the developers forum. It would be a fantastic discussion on the developers forum, I think, as well. So yeah, so there's multiple places where I think we can take that idea forward. So any other questions on the developer program? Is there a thought about how this connects to the carpentries? So most of the carpentries at the moment are very much geared at brand new beginners. So, you know, it's kind of the introduction to R and introduction to R and AC, because like a two day course. So that's very much aimed at people who are starting from an Excel spreadsheet and working into how to get that into R and how to do very basics. So I think whereas we could develop some of this into the carpentries at the moment, I think maybe it's better to let the carpentries be for beginners initially, and then we will probably expand that out as we get more instructors and more people involved. The other things I wanted to mention. Okay, so that's that. So the other ways, like, and I think this, your suggestion of that the cloud base would be a perfect new working group as well. You know, I think get yourself, and then other people who want to basically have a cloud and bio conductor working group would be Berlin's suggestion, because then you can think of the various different ways and get other people on board to help you as well. Because sometimes we all have these great ideas and then we realize we run out of time. So if you can get more people to help you, it's always good. Two things that Laurie is doing at the moment is like package review. So if you're kind of a developer and sometimes it's good to learn from other people's mistakes. So if you're reviewing somebody else's code, you sometimes can learn about your own coding, whether, you know, good things and bad things. So like, you know, for people who've developed already and have that kind of experience, joining the package review or the package triage groups are good ways to be involved. And these slides were presented as part of the CAB, like what the package review and the triage is as well. I thought I had one other slide there. Okay. And then I just wanted to mention, I just want to open this to everybody in a second, but we have like, there's multiple kind of Slack channels. Does everybody know where the Slack is? Anybody who doesn't, who isn't on Slack or who doesn't know about the developer Slack? Okay. Seems like everybody does. Yeah. So the channels, there's developer mentorship, which is the mentorship program. Sorry. There's somebody online. Sorry. Yeah, I just raised the hand. I was about to say, I literally just posted in my last message in the chat, the link to the by-conductor Slack. So if people wonder about it, it's on the by-connector main page, but out of a different conversation, I just posted the link. Brilliant. Thanks, Kevin. And on the Slack, there's a couple of different channels. So one is the developer mentorship. So if you've got any questions about the developer mentorship program, and you want to be a mentor or a mentee, that's a really good place to ask those questions. The developer's form, which is the monthly zoom, one hour zoom, basically on the topics related, that might be of interest to developers. Other places, which would be great to see more developers be involved is on two diversity and inclusions channels. One is a diverse bio-sea. And the other is accessible this. So that's basically how do we make everything that we're doing accessible to most people. So it was started by a couple of people that were actually colorblind and wanted to make sure, particularly with single cell, where there's all these UMAPs, which are completely unintelligible because it's all my color, so many people. And I just put in the Slack, so the email address for the community advisory board there, which is another way to try and just contact a lot of us that are on this. But I kind of just want to open this up to find out what do people need, what do developers want, what do you want to contribute as much as what you want to need, what do you feel like you need? So just, I would just like to put in a plug for the mentorship program. If you're thinking about becoming a mentor, like I would say, absolutely do it. We were very worried at the beginning of the program about sort of how much of a time commitment it would be. And honestly, it's been very tight, it's been very easy. Had maybe six meetings or so over the course of like three months with one of my mentees who's now like her package is ready to go, ready to submit. The other one has been a little bit more drawn out, but the meetings have been more sparse and they're still ongoing. So it's adaptive to what the mentee needs, but it really, it's just been like a one hour meeting, no more than like every other week, pretty light time commitment. And I think it's really great to have that sort of thing in place because at least for me, I was very lucky. I had a postdoc when I was a grad student who had made bio conductor packages before and sort of knew the tips and tricks. And so being able to provide that for other people is just very rewarding and like pretty simple once you've done it once and you sort of know how the process works. Anybody online? Want to come in with comments, questions, suggestions? What do you think would really have helped you most in kind of your journey from user to developer? So I'll just talk for my like, so I know that you were mentioning hackathons, bio conductor hackathons. And I think that that might be something like, you know, interesting like where people can learn how to develop in our package that like we actually, our package, like by package basically is a product of our labs hackathon where none of us basically knew how to develop in our package but Nathan like taught us like all of the like roles, what it needs. And I think that it was just a nice kind of like practical experience when you kind of like dive into it and you learn on the run. So like it's just, you know, a suggestion like what could be like potentially like a teaching experience for people who might be, who might be like into this. And what do you think works best in that hackathon situation? What makes it successful to a failure in a hackathon? You just, it's just, you definitely have to have someone like organized there. Like you have to be like, you know, it has to have a structure. It's not like, oh, let's do a program and let's, let's do like a program and we'll see how it goes. And let's all brainstorm like, no, it has to be definitely like structured. Like you will take care of this, you'll take care of this. But as the people are coming together, you're kind of like learning what like individual people are still doing. It has to be interconnected. But I think that it's still pretty scary. I think I find hackathons incredibly scary. Like I always get there and I have no idea what to do ever. But like this experience kind of like helped me maybe just like smaller groups with someone like who is kind of like leading it. But, and maybe just have a session kind of like at the beginning just about the organization of the, of the like, you know, R package. Like when I started an R package, I had no idea even like how the files are organized within it. And, and, you know, just kind of instead of doing a workshop, it would be basically something like, you know, developers workshop with a potential of an end product actually that you're not just learning, but you're motivated by, by creating something. And I think that that's just, it just kind of motivates you more to do that. Yeah. I think the hackathon ideas is very welcome one. One of the things I would want to watch out for is the notion that I'm going to develop a package. We're going to submit it, it'll be admitted, and then undone. Undone, yeah. And so one place to put a hackathon is on existing packages because none of them are perfect. Many of them can be improved in many ways. Documentation for example, how do you add documentation? How do you verify and make sure that it is aesthetically attractive? And so on. Those are things that many people don't know how to do. And so one could do something that is not as hard as a de novo package, but it's an incremental improvement to many of the packages that already exist. It's a possible framework for a, even a multi package hackathon where you can learn about different features of keeping packages going. And be a member of the community that is improving the whole ecosystem, rather than contributing one pack. I did try to do that once with the IOC check and maybe it's time to do another one again. Because we tried to do one like that, like the IOC check for most of our ourselves and minds. This is still on. And I do think that that's actually great. Like in the end, this is how our hackathon, like the lab hackathon was. There was already a package, but yeah, it just needed to go further. And I think that's like, once you have something, like creating our package, like from, you know, from scratch, it's not that hard. It's just like few commands, right? But like, yeah, then knowing actually really how to organize it and how it should be done. And like, you know, like what's to avoid that, like there was the learning experience. So yeah, that is a good point. One more thought about a learning experience, which is fixing something that's truly broken. And you may deliberately break something and have somebody fix it and learn how to use the debugger and so forth. These are things which are essential to development, but many people do not really get into debugging and profiling and making things go faster and so forth. So there's a series of topics that we should probably organize somewhere that we can just work on to improve our, you know, the on-ramp for those who are going to develop and become experts, that's what we will see. So who wants to, anybody who is interested in taking this on, because that's my, like my own, anybody who knows me, I'm very much on, let's actually plan something out of this, rather than come up with a wish list on the couch. Would anybody like to work with us? I can take notes on that. Yeah, is there anybody else who'd like to work on this? So who would actually be kind of keen to do something like, maybe do some sort of a hackathon of taking a package you like that, you know, needs to be improved, or anybody who wants to volunteer their package to be the guinea pig. I think the volunteering package is like, you know, advertising is your package broken, like we can, like let's fix it. And, you know, then it can be a contributor, like you can have a name on a paper when it comes out, you know. But yeah, but yeah, I'm not offering it at this point. Yeah. Okay, so I think I could volunteer any package I've worked on, it's like, you know, something that needs help. Yeah, I'll volunteer a package, definitely. Well, maybe we need the, you know, the package hospital. And we can... A little triage process. What? A little triage process. Well, if there's some packages, I think Laurie could probably be able to identify that are close to triage, but that are actually very popular. And maybe they're more important than other packages to get done. Yeah, probably. And that was kind of like the idea of the package triage group, too, is that not, I mean, you can get, like for me, I don't have time. My email is normally your package is broken on Bioconductor, and you've been ignoring the automatic notifications for too long. And like I said, I'm imagining bears and bioconductor. The less I don't have time to like really get into why the error is occurring, and I can point you to the build system about the error is where people are more interested in getting involved, even something like that of doing a little bug report for packages that they know are failing, that are of interest, and just either put in full request in for those packages, or at least giving them a more informative, like error message, or that they can pinpoint why it's occurring more. Because sometimes that's half the battle. Again, not necessarily a good requirement to be on the package trio. You could just send your email and be done, but yeah. Okay, so maybe we send an email or some sort of a list out so people can say that their package needs to go under a package rescue, I can apologize. So we call it package rescue or package hospital. Yeah, package hospital, package hospital. Okay, we're going to start off a package hospital. For where we can have, we can use Nathan's group hackathon format to actually then try and rescue them if people can volunteer for that. Okay, I know we're over time here, and there's a lot of other exciting things on the schedule, so I won't keep people. We've come up with a couple of very concrete ideas, basically the cloud-based, which I think is great that we go ahead with that basically. Also the package hospital and hackathon down to package hospitals. I think those are really great ideas. So thank you, everybody. Thank you, everyone online. If there's any other ideas you have, please continue the discussion on Slack.