I started using Julia for a research project with a learning by doing attitude. Before heading to my project, I learned basic Julia syntax and features. Now I have been working on my project for a couple of weeks. Since there are tasks that aren’t as standard as simple examples in the manual and I don’t have a solid techinical background (though I do a PhD), I got stuck and couldn’t get enough timely help from the Internet. I found that a lot of time was spent on struggling on things that I don’t have a good sense, but an expert could easily identify the issue and explain it to me (or point me to the right reading material). Ideally, I would prefer to systematically learn Julia and numerical methods, but the research project has a tight schedule so it would be more practical to focus on learning what’s needed along the way and let the knowledge accumulate over time. This is also how I learned Matlab and SAS in the past.
For this reason, I was wondering whether there is a way to find a tutor who can give suggestions and answer questions related to a specific well-defined project. I will be happy to offer a compensation for his/her time and help. Any thoughts on this?
Start with simple toy projects before committing fully and ask questions here when you are struggling.
Find a sub-community in the Julia community that is doing work similar to what you are doing. For example, optimisation, machine learning, physics simulation, statistics, graph theory, etc.
Try to be “involved” in the development of some package that is developed or maintained by that sub-community. This could be just improving their documentation or it could be actually implementing a new feature that you need for your work or just in return for their mentoring. That’s a way to “compensate” people for their time helping you by contributing to their Julia packages.
If you still have questions when writing your research code, try coming up with a minimal example and ask here and people will be happy to help. See Please read: make it easier to help you for some tips on how to do that.
This is not to say that a personal tutor is not going to be useful but there are other ways to learn Julia too. Good luck
I could also offer you to work as mentor, but I do not know which is your field of research, and of course my knowledge is somewhat specialized. If you are interested drop me a private message.
Tutoring aside (maybe someone here is willing to do it), my advice to you would be to: