I’m new here and still learning Julia. I want to contribute to Lilith Hafner’s Scratch Quicksort code as a first step in helping the Julia language/community. Before I start my coding, I wanted to ask some questions.
Should I post a single broad category topic or several smaller/specific topics?
If I have a “how best to do this in Julia?” question, where should it go?
If multiple people respond, is there a method for prioritizing the responses? I want to avoid the all-comments-are-equally-valid problem.
My contribution will be judged on its performance. Is there a standard testing framework that I should use?
If my question fits equally into performance and sort topics, which should I choose?
Probably depends, if people have opinions you might get to hear that, but no harm done
I think I would post shorter questions in the slack/zulip, probably helpdesk if they don’t fit in a specific category, while discourse is more for discussion questions, but that line is a bit blurry. Again, try and see where you get responses.
No clue, go with your gut, go with whatever response gets the most hearts, or just listen to people named Stefan, you do you
Don’t really know about this one, but I found this one in one of lilith’s PRs about sorting, could be useful.
I think go with your gut again. Maybe think if you want responses from people who follow one or the other category? And if you want to move it later you can always ask someone with more powers.
Welcome! The discussions here do tend to lean more towards the user perspective, but it is blurry (and especially so since Julia excels at getting users to become developers). When talking about concrete issues and code changes to a particular package or base Julia, often that is best done on GitHub itself. But it can also happen here.
Categorization here is fairly loose. You can’t go wrong with a General Usage topic in most cases. The main reasons to post in a different category would be to provide more context about where you’re coming from (e.g., New to Julia can be a helpful signal to others that you’re new to the language and can shape the answers you get), or to describe the exact class of problem you’re chasing (e.g., Performance hacking or Tooling setup), or the kinds of people you’d like attention from (e.g., folks can specifically setup notifications on some Specific Domains or the like). Or, in reality, a mix of the above. Beyond categories, we also use tags like sort to help with discoverability — tags can be applied to topics in any category.
It’s always helpful to keep topics focused and targeted as much as possible, but it’s also important to ensure there’s enough context that others can understand your end-goal.
