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What, Why, Who and How

What?

The idea behind office hours is to provide additional channel of communication between MXNet SDK engineers and customers who rely on projects and features being worked on by respective engineers. It is weekly 1 hour session during which customers of MXNet could ask questions related to projects that SDK team engineers are working on: Gluon, Keras with MXNet, ONNX on MXNet, ModelServer, Scala API, R API.

Why?

This channel would facilitate realtime conversation during which engineers could:

  • provide answers and insights into how particular functionality was implemented and is meant (or not) to be used

  • explain what are the plans to extend and/or evolve projects that SDK team is working on

  • debug customer issues

  • propose solutions to customers needs using projects and features currently available

While filing issues for the same on github is definitely one way of communicating with customers, it could at times be more suitable to have personal communication and provide guidance/help in real time in order to arrive at solution sooner rather than later.

On a top of that having this additional channel of communication could help with increasing adoption rate of MXNet as customers would be able to get answers to their questions with less delays.

Who?

MXNet SDK oncall engineer would be primary driver behind facilitating office hours. However, any team member might be engaged to help with customers questions. That could be required in case customer's question requires deeper expertise in particular project or area.

How?

MXNet SDK team would have 1 hour every week to dedicate to office hours meeting. Typical flow for process is like this:

  • at least 24 hours before office hours session customer signs up for one of 2 slots (each slot is 30 minutes) by filing jira issue. In that issue customer will provide questions/concerns and relevant details pertaining to subject.

  • before or on a day preceding office hours session current team's oncall engineer reviews existing queue of filed issues and investigates 1 or 2 filed for upcoming session. The goal is to prepare for session as much as possible in advance.

    • if necessary oncall engineer could to engage SME that has a lot of expertise in area relevant to question/issue filed. If that is the case such SME might be required to attend corresponding slot during office hours session.

  • at a scheduled time oncall engineer dials into meeting bridge and verifies that corresponding customer joined the line.

    • if by the end of time slot issue/question has not been fully addressed, oncall engineer proposes to take further conversation offline. This way office hours slots won't spill over and both slots could be accommodated for.

  • if any of the questions have not been fully addressed during session, oncall engineer is responsible for following up and address outstanding scope of issue/question. Corresponding jira issue filed for session should be used as the outlet for following up.

    • one possible follow up could end up being new feature request or bug fix. If that is the case - oncall engineer should convert corresponding office hours issue into normal github issue in corresponding repo.

    • SME might have to participate in following up by pairing up with oncall engineer.

Process description for customers who would like to sign up

Overview

The MXNet SDK team in Palo Alto is offering two 30-minutes slots during office hours on Tuesdays 10am-11am (PST). We host them onsite in the AWS Palo Alto office 2111 Univerity ave, East Palo Alto, CA 94303 in SJC18 xx.yyy.

Conference Bridge Information
Chime meeting ID: ________
Join via browser screen share: https://chime.aws/...
Join via phone (US): +1-929-432-4463,,________#
Join via phone (US toll-free): +1-855-552-4463,,________#
International dial-in: https://chime.aws/dialinnumbers/
In-room video system: Ext: 62000, Meeting PIN: ________#

How can we help you?

The following are a few examples of the types of consultations we provide:
* Gluon
* Keras on MXNet
* ONNX on MXNet
* MXNet APIs: Scala, R
* Model Server

Office hours might not be a good fit for discussions around already identified bugs, issues, feature requests. Github issues in corresponding repos is the best way to keep conversation going and public for such cases.

Before attending

Try finding answers on:
* Our discussion forum (https://discuss.mxnet.io)
* MXNet user mailing list (https://lists.apache.org/list.html?user@mxnet.apache.org)
* StackOverflow mxnet tag (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mxnet)
* MXNet website (https://mxnet.incubator.apache.org/faq/)
* Github issues (MXNet: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues, ModelServer: https://github.com/awslabs/mxnet-model-server/issues)

How to sign up

If channels listed above did not help you to find answer or solution to your question feel free to sign up to available slot during upcoming office hours session.
In order to sign up:

  • open existing queue for MXNet SDK office hours sessions;
  • identify what is the next available time slot;
  • create a new issue of type “Office hours”
    • make sure to specify details pertaining to your request in order for engineers to be able to prepare for the session;
    • ensure to fill in issue title as “AWS MXNet SDK Office hours. Slot _ of 2 on ??/??/??” with appropriate slot # and date;

Please make sure to submit your request within at least 24 hours before the time slot you are signing up for to allow enough time for engineers to prepare.

To contact team through email please use mxnet-sdk-oncall@amazon.com


TODO: if office hours sessions pick up - automate jira to prefill title of the Office hours issue type with next available timeslot and date automatically.

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