This is something I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while, but it took the collective tech community having a meltdown last week to remind me about it.
And so rather than sit on the sidelines or rant on Twitter, I thought I’d put pen to paper on it and do something constructive.
I’m not pretending to do something original here - other people are already throwing their hats into the ring with similar offerings, so I figure why not do the same?
The Deal
I want to set aside some time each week for mentoring developers. Pairing on code, debugging issues, discussing approaches to a problem and tradeoffs, code reviews, whatever may come up.
Open source is one of my particular passions right now - if you’re not sure where to start, or would like to get involved in the open source world, I’m more than happy to answer questions or give advice.
UPDATE (2021): thanks to Geoff for reminding me about this post. For now I’m going to pause this work as this was ~8 years ago and I’m in a place where I’m mentoring a number of colleagues at work but also find myself stepping back from open source work to preserve whatever remaining spare time and energy I have.
Why?
I’ve been fortunate enough to have many great mentors in my programming career to bounce ideas off, discuss problems and possible solutions, and just general questions sometimes not even related to programming.
I figure this is one way for me to give back to the community that has helped me out over the years.
P.S.
My schedule is going to be all over the place in the coming weeks so setting aside a specific time is gonna be silly (lol timezones). I’ve also got a couple of big ticket issues I need to investigate over the next couple of days while things are fresh in my mind, so that might hold up on kicking things off. And this is all on top of my regular job.
But feel free to drop me a line in the interim and see what we can line up.