It seems like a nice thing to do to help people out. I can see a reason why some people might be sceptical though: It's difficult to tell the difference between someone who's made mistakes and can share that with you, and someone who's just wasting your time. Success helps to differentiate the two.
You should be a mentor
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: You should be a mentor
#12Some of you might be interested to give this mentoring stuff a try, either as a montor or as a student. If so, you might be interested in checking out the Learn Programming Mentoring Community (LPMC).
This project was started when it became clear that quite a few posters in r/learnprogramming wanted to contribute to open source projects, but didn't know how or noticed that having their PR rejected did in fact not afford the greatest learning experience. LPMC aims to, among other things:
1. Match students with projects
2. Help students create pull requests worthy of being merged by upstream (offloading busy maintainers)
If this sounds interesting you can check out http://learnprogramming.github.io/ or come shoot the shit in #lpmc@irc.freenode.net
Re: You should be a mentor
#13“That guy doesn’t know shit. Why should I listen to him?" If you have to ask that question, then you already know the answer. With a good mentor, thoughts like that would never even enter your mind. Why? Because a good mentor would never just tell you what to do, he/she would share data in such a way that you would learn what to do. If you don't find a way to turn mentor input into new actionable wisdom very quickly…
Can you please elaborate on what you think is a good mentor, and how one may become a good mentor? On that note, I've been considering of mentoring entry/medium-level developers for some time now but I seriously don't know what exactly that entails. My goal is to help people understand and appreciate the importance of well formed, semantic HTML and CSS and unobtrusive javascript. My belief is that all these different…
Why not do a session/presentation/lunch&learn on how to build web apps without a library. Or how to build something like backbone. Showing teams how to test their front end code is also a great way to introduce better practices and more concern for quality.
The biggest challenge to being a mentor isn't wisdom, it is respect. The person you are trying to teach needs to respect you before they will be willing to learn from you.
Re: You should be a mentor
#14Learn from other people, let people learn from you. A great way to cultivate a more fulsome understanding of a topic is to try to describe it to others, to share your understanding with others. Mentoring is like writing that way, and like writing, you can't expect to be good at it without practice. I think sharing what you know with people, people who you believe are both less and more knowledgeable than you, is incredibly beneficial to any environment (work, play, whatever). MENTOR EVERYONE!
Re: You should be a mentor
#15“That guy doesn’t know shit. Why should I listen to him?" If you have to ask that question, then you already know the answer. With a good mentor, thoughts like that would never even enter your mind. Why? Because a good mentor would never just tell you what to do, he/she would share data in such a way that you would learn what to do. If you don't find a way to turn mentor input into new actionable wisdom very quickly…
Can you please elaborate on what you think is a good mentor, and how one may become a good mentor? On that note, I've been considering of mentoring entry/medium-level developers for some time now but I seriously don't know what exactly that entails. My goal is to help people understand and appreciate the importance of well formed, semantic HTML and CSS and unobtrusive javascript. My belief is that all these different…
We've mentor about 75 students in front-end development at Thinkful (thinkful.com) – we're actually working with a team of about 12 mentors now. If you'd like to join, feel free to reach out (email is dan at thinkful). We've learned a ton about best practices for how to help beginners learn over the last 6 months of doing it.
Re: You should be a mentor
#16Learn from other people, let people learn from you. A great way to cultivate a more fulsome understanding of a topic is to try to describe it to others, to share your understanding with others. Mentoring is like writing that way, and like writing, you can't expect to be good at it without practice. I think sharing what you know with people, people who you believe are both less and more knowledgeable than you, is incr…
Couldn't agree more – when we started Thinkful (mentor-led training for front-end development), my co-founder and I mentored every student ourselves, and it was amazing how quickly it exposed every hole in our understanding of even basic concepts. Even though the team has grown and we now have 12 mentors, we still try to work with a few students because we enjoy it so much.
Re: You should be a mentor
#17How about the opposite question, at the beginning of your career how do you find mentors?
Re: You should be a mentor
#18I would love a mentor. How do you find mentors in software development? Pick a public figure that you respect?
Re: You should be a mentor
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please elaborate on what you think is a good mentor, and how one may become a good mentor? On that note, I've been considering of mentoring entry/medium-level developers for some time now but I seriously don't know what exactly that entails. My goal is to help people understand and appreciate the importance of well formed, semantic HTML and CSS and unobtrusive javascript. My belief is that all these different…
Why not do a session/presentation/lunch&learn on how to build web apps without a library. Or how to build something like backbone. Showing teams how to test their front end code is also a great way to introduce better practices and more concern for quality. The biggest challenge to being a mentor isn't wisdom, it is respect. The person you are trying to teach needs to respect you before they will be willing to learn…
This is what I tried to tell a conference promoter. He listed companies for his mobile conference, as speakers, that had all published bad or failed apps.
He response was to delete me from the mailing list. Best way to deal with a dissenting voice, delete it.
Re: You should be a mentor
#20Teaching / mentoring / coaching is good for you as well. Trying to teach others forces you to learn your subject even better than you already know it. Additionally, the questions and counter-points and feedback you get from students / people you're mentoring /etc. will expose you to new ideas and new ways of thinking, which you can then integrate and synthesize around.
I don't know if I'd be able to do much "one on one" mentoring, as time is awfully limited right now. But I have a lecture/class or two in mind that I'll probably offer to teach somewhere in the RTP area later this year. I have learned enough about market research to do a useful one or two night session on the topic.
No, I'm not an expert on it, but what I've learned in the past 2 years would possibly be beneficial to the people who are now, where I was two years ago. I figure if I can help shorten someone else's learning curve, that's a good thing. And, inevitably, if I do the class, I'll learn a lot from the process itself.
So yeah, if you have some useful knowledge you've accumulated (and you probably do) teach a class, or take on a pupil to mentor. It's a win-win for everybody.