ReasonML Q&A Resource - help wanted!

#1

I’ve started a project I hope can be helpful to the ReasonML community. The idea is to crowd source helpful information for newcomers, in a format that’s not formal (and not necessarily polished). Quantity over quality here, I’m interested in gathering as much information as possible rather than creating perfect and polished guides and answers (there are other arenas/places where that type of thing can live).

It consists of a GitHub repository (https://github.com/zth/reasonml-q-a) where the idea is this:

  • Newcomers (or any members of the community really) post their questions as regular issues.
  • Members of the community help triage, label and answer the issues. Discussions can ensue, just like in regular issues.
  • Everything labelled as publishable with automagically end up published on https://reasonml-q-a.netlify.com/. This hopefully means it’ll end up in search engines, and people will find their way there. This is made possible through the sheer wizardry of @sgrove and onegraph.com, which has allowed me to set this whole thing (GitHub repo -> actual blog) up with like 3 clicks :mind-blown:.

What I want to achieve is the following:

  • Give people a natural place to post questions and get answers that other people can find easily. Discord is really really great for getting answers, but it’s not searchable or findable for an outsider. This forum is great for getting answers, but it IMO caters to a more thought through type of question than what I’m looking for here.
  • Establish the behavior of contributing both questions and answers to the community. Somewhere natural place to put your thoughts/questions/frustrations that’s visible to the entire community.
  • Create and curate a large body of questions and answers that can help people when they get stuck.

The more we cover the better, even if the question is a one-liner and the answer is just a link. It’s about creating a discoverable foundation of information that’s useful in itself, but also usable for advancing the community in other ways.

Ideas for the future:

  • Build simple bots for both Discord and Twitter that’ll allow us to easily transfer questions (and maybe even entire conversations with answers etc) from that medium to this issue tracker.
  • Curate, categorize and summarize the information as we get it. Think “Here’s the top issues when getting started”, or “This is what people typically don’t get instantly with ReasonReact”.
  • Use this as a base to improve actual documentation, write polished guides and what not. This can hopefully help with all of that.

breathes There, what are your thoughts on this? :smiley: Anyone interested in helping out answering questions etc? How can we make this as approachable and welcoming as possible?

Thank you for reading!

#2

I’d love to help.

Is it to replace StackOverflow or this chat forum? Or is this a curated list of frequently asked questions on Discord, ie we dont have to encourage anyone to ask questions at the repo directly. I like the later.

Really digging the website btw.

#3

I’d love your help! Let’s discuss what the best thing to help out with could be?

The idea isn’t to replace anything really. It’s more a curated list of FAQs, but I’m honestly not opposed to questions being asked directly there either. Using GitHub (where more or less anyone already have an account) and issues allows all data to be instantly accessible to anyone to do what they want with through the GitHub API (via OneGraph.com for example). Hopefully this can spark some innovation too.

This is a complement if anything, a natural place to put things that frequently (or infrequently for that matter) come up and that’s challenging to people. Hopefully we can start pulling things out of Discord as well so it becomes searchable.

Perhaps the biggest reason for doing this is that I see people struggling getting started again and again, and I want to do something about it and help out. This is probably not perfect, but it’s something and hopefully a step in the right direction.

#4

Yeah, that’s the question that occurred to me too: are you sure you’re not reimplementing neither StackOverflow nor Spectrum Chat? Not that [the Reason community] in Spectrum is active much, but won’t your Q&A exacerbate the problem, fragmenting the community resources even more?

Discord is really really great for getting answers, but it’s not searchable or findable for an outsider.

That’s why I like the promise of Spectrum so much. Low-friction and indexable. (Also, might be less frantic than Discord. I personally try not to go there. Information firehoses are not my forte :man_shrugging:)

#5

This has been mentioned before but Stack Overflow is a site for a very specific style of questions. A lot of questions that newcomers have may not necessarily be appropriate for SO e.g. ‘What is the recommended way of doing XYZ in Reason?’

As for Spectrum, it’s cool but I’m not sure how searchable it is. GitHub issues are very, very good for searchability, including from Google search. I’ve never seen Spectrum pages in any Google search results. Also all the other benefits–GitHub has been around for a while, we know we can get data out of it easily, etc.

Lastly, since zth is taking the initiative and no one else has so far, I think it’s reasonable to follow their lead :slight_smile:

Btw, another really cool project that could use some help is actually Redex–the Reason package index. The community would be really grateful to anyone who could somewhat fix up, streamline, and automate that :slight_smile:

A unified place for the best projects to contribute to
#6

All solid points! And hey, @zth, didn’t mean to rain on your parade and all, it’s just that best code is no code and there’s a lot to do for the Reason ecosystem, so I thought I’d provide some scepsis before someone spends a lot of time on this :slight_smile:

#7

+1 on letting newcomers ask the question on github too if they feel like
+1 on best code is no code - there are plenty of open issues to work on already (which some of us are already on, and kudos to them all!)

At the very least, we can have a github issue tracker to track FAQs. If someone can take the time out to maintain website, then great! But I’m super happy with a simple gh issue tracker too

#8

Topics off the top of my head that could go into the FAQ - 1. getting started with native FFI 2. getting started with ctypes. Something I’ve noticed on the #native-development channel.

I’d love to hear about esy related FAQs if you’ve noticed. The docs at esy.sh have been at the back of my head, but keep failing to do something about it

#9

Thank you for all your comments! I just want to clarify that I’ve spent literally 3 clicks setting this whole thing up using OneGraph, precisely for the reasons you also mention - there are enough things to work on and questions to answer without putting time into coding something that already exists.

I choose GitHub as a platform for a number of reasons. I do not believe this will fragment the community resources more. This isn’t an official resource in any way shape or form, and I’m just trying to do what I can to help people get started with Reason and keep going :slight_smile: It’s pretty obvious to me at least that whatever solutions we have right now aren’t fully solving the issues we need solving.

I really do appreciate the concern for the platform chosen, but as of now, I will not be moving away from GitHub. One of the main reasons I chose GitHub was because of the great API available, and that I could spend literally no time setting it up, so I (and we!) can focus whatever time’s available on curating and answering questions instead of coding or arguing about coding. As I’ve stated before, nothing is stopping anyone from cross posting to your favorite platform, or from us moving this whole thing to another platform in the future. But right now, it is where it is, and I’d like to focus my time on the actual questions instead.

#10

@zth would love to help too !

#11

@Prateek13727 awesome! :smile: Let me get back to you (and others interested in helping out) in here sometime this weekend with some thoughts on where the help is most needed.

#12

I’ve updated the readme on the repo to reflect my goals with the project and how you can contribute if you’re interested: https://github.com/zth/reasonml-q-a

Spoiler - at this point, it’s mostly about posting questions and information to answer them. But please do check out the updated readme!