# 02-03-2022 ## Today’s plan: Pernosco! ## And a RRC retrospective - Felix Klock will lead us through a tutorial of Pernosco - Followed by a short Q&A The recording of Felix's talk will be available on [his YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7PjHknydC_930Irco2RUKw). ## Retrospective In RRC tradition we discuss what has worked, hasn't worked and what needs improvement. We'll add our thoughts to this hackmd. The current flow of RRC after experimenting since October... - Session A - Open with a description/explanation of the code we will examine by Niko. - People will poke at the code for a time ( 10 to 15 mins) on their own and record their observations in hackmd. - We share and discuss our observations - We individually offer questions about the code we'd like to understand better - Session B - Continuing with the same code from Session A we use Pernosco to examine the code in action - We individually record our observations - We share and discuss In general the number of sessions to cover a topic will depend on the complexity of the code and the needs of participants. ### What worked? - (Forest) As someone who hasn't contributed to the compiler, it was nice to meet people who do work on the compiler, and what parts of the codebase look like. - Getting to know each other through regular meetings of a small group means we feel comfortable reaching out to each other outside the sessions - Introducing the code before the session. This could also be valuable to the community on the whole as a recorded description/explanation. ### What didn't? - Consistent attendence? - Overviews that are too zoomed out - Finding a level in the content that was interesting to those working with the compiler, working in other areas of rust and aspirants. - More people elected to not attend when the video recording was announced ### What needs to be improved? - How parts of the club are recorded for others to watch - How to galvanize the large amount of interest in this club - Tooling that is used? - Pronosco? - What other tools might help at a mid level? per remy - Helpful to walk through stack trace - Inspecting with some kind of debugger that isn't as complex - GDB? - rr? - Ways to see the process of actually contributing - https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/305296-rustc-reading-club/topic/Call.20for.20action/near/269598039 <--per discussion this isn't a reading club - it may makes sense to start other groups but finding leaders has been the biggest road block - Reading club focused on the dev guide or other resources - Helps prevent people coming in and only knowing what is shown at the meetings - Mention the resources to learn more at the beginning of every session. - Perhaps open with asking everyone what they hope to get from the session and explain the prupose of the RRC. - Forest also wanted to see more speakers like the Pernosco demo and the Petrochenkov talk. - I'm ambivelant on this point as we don't want to become a meetup. - Suggestion from katja: Maybe only record Niko's introduction or description of a topic versus the whole session. It might generate more interest. ### What are the intentions for the participants? #### Mission of club is to grow contributors for the compiler and the rustc dev guide - Aspirants: - People who are newer to the compiler and the rustc dev guide - They want to see how to read parts of the codebase and learn to do so on their own - Not exactly "mentored sprints" - Too many people need to get involved to make this happen? It is a different kind of group from the RRC. # tl;dr: The RRC in it's current format isn't working for asiprants or mid levels. - Pernosco is too complex for mid levels, recommend gdb and or rr - Aspirants need to start with more fundamentals. Perhaps a reading club focuses on the dev guide. - Begin sessions reinforcing the resources that exist and the goals of the club. Helpful as new people show up. - Record Niko's session or code selection intros. - Remy may be interested in leading a reading club featuring the dev guide.