Questions / Contact #

These docs aren’t very long. Please read them from start to end before reaching out.

Don’t be rude and ignore the effort others put into this. Instead, please value their time and help improve these docs.

Simple / quick things #

Use the crowd knowledge in our Deep Learning Mattermost channel.

Chat ettiquette #

• Reply () to messages. Keep the conversation in the thread. There are hundreds of people in the channel, keep it clean and don’t spam.
• Mattermost understands markdown, use it.
• Use code blocks (```) to paste snippets and console output, not screenshots (much bigger and not searchable).
  • Press SHIFT+CTRL+C to copy in most terminals
  • Press SHIFT+ENTER to add required line breaks for ```-blocks in Mattermost
• Make it easy to help you. Ask good questions (see below).
• After you learned something, improve the docs.

Good Questions #

Asking good questions is an art and it’s in general useful to read the Stackoverflow Guidelines on “How to ask” (also the other linked pages). But as people in general don’t like to read a lot, here a few simple guidelines:

• Make it easy for others to help you: People don’t have a magic crystal ball telling them anything about what you were trying to achieve. Describe your problem, what were you trying to do, what have you tried already, what did you expect, what happened instead?
• Value the time of others: People want to help you in their spare time, but not if you don’t invest the minimum effort. So include information that helps to answer them.
  • Fill in the question template below
  • Get links to relevant job(s) from the current jobs or archive dashboards
  • If you can, link to the code / script you were trying to run, otherwise paste relevant snippets in code blocks (```)
• Fill out the Question template below

Question template #

<!-- Please fill out this question template. Remove parts that don't apply. -->

**What is your issue?**

[What are you trying to do? What did you expect to happen? What happened instead?]
```
[Include code snippets if possible.]
```

**What command line did you use?**

```
[Paste your command line here. Please don't post screenshots, copy & paste the text instead.]
```

**Was there any console output with error messages?**

```
[Paste the output here. Please don't post screenshots, copy & paste the text instead.]
```

**Which jobs/nodes are affected?**

[List affected jobids, if any.]
[List affected nodes, if the issue only happens on specific nodes.]

**Anything else that might be helpful?**

[Text goes here.]

Less crowdy things #

In general, please ask in the Deep Learning Mattermost channel: Many people might have (had) the same problem, and many might be able to help you. Also, the channel is searchable, so please try to accumulate knowledge there first.

However, there are some things not suitable for many eyes. In those cases, please message Christian Schulze ( christian.schulze@dfki.de ; admin, accounts, hardware, security, strategy), or Joachim Folz ( joachim.folz@dfki.de ; monitoring, logging, libraries, containers, docs).