Office hours and the LLVM community calendar.

About a thousand people contribute code to LLVM each year. There are probably many thousands who work on the LLVM code base in downstream projects. And even more people use the LLVM libraries to build other cool projects on top of.

The many LLVM users and contributors have long been communicating with each other using mailing lists, bugzilla, and more recently, Discourse and github issues. Next to these asynchronous communication channels, the LLVM community has also long had more synchronous communication channels, such as IRC and Discord. Twice per year, there is the opportunity to communicate synchronously face-to-face with other LLVM-ers from around the world: at the LLVM developer meetings. The LLVM socials that happen in various places around the world also provide the opportunity to meet face-to-face with LLVMers in your area.

In recent years, we’ve added a number of online “face-to-face” synchronous communication channels. They often are the best way to make progress quickly. I think many don’t know of their existence yet, or just need a little encouragement to make more use of them. Therefore, I thought it was worthwhile to highlight them in this post:

• Online sync-ups are regular calls on specific topics. A few of them have been running for years, but most started only in the last 2 years. A full list of current online sync-ups is documented at https://llvm.org/docs/GettingInvolved.html#online-sync-ups
• More recently, “office hours” have started. In these, specific experienced people in the community make themselves available for a chat and to answer questions on anything in their area of expertise. They are documented at https://llvm.org/docs/GettingInvolved.html#office-hours. Whether you’re experienced or not in LLVM, both online sync-ups and office hours can be a great way to get advice and help on any issues you might be facing when using or contributing to LLVM.

One last way to find LLVM events that may be interesting to you, is to look at our LLVM community calendar. It shows the schedule for most office hours, online sync-ups and socials. If you’re an organizer of any of these events, please do not forget to add your event to the community calendar by inviting calendar@llvm.org.