Hi everyone. I have been serving as a mentor for Front End Development for about two months and I'd love to share my experience with all of you. I've collaborated in three ways:
DEV has a Beta feature that connects mentors with mentees and you can choose the area of expertise you'd like for your mentor. This connected me with someone in another country (I'm Mexican) who is eager to be a Full Stack JS Developer.
I have three friends that are not satisfied with their career choices and are interesting in coding as an alternative.
I started a new job and there is an Junior Dev who I help on a regular basis.
I'd love to tell you what it is like so far and share my two cents if you are in a similar situation.
Be encouraging
We all struggle, even simple ideas don't always feel that way the first time. I've spent hours trying to understand something without any guidance and ended up seeing a 5 min video after which everything just made sense. I've also had the opportunity to see something similar with the mentees.
Sometimes when I'm learning I feel frustrated and/or stupid. In those moments, a kind word goes a long way. I really appreciate the opportunity to give it to a student.
Respect your time and others
This might be obvious for you. Right now I'm working full-time, doing college part time, part time freelancing, getting to 9% body fat and on top of that mentoring. If you can do something to provide some certainty when you schedule a meeting, it helps make things smoother.
Thinking that I'm spending two free hours today with my mentee while I could be earning X dollars from my client. Makes me quite uncomfortable. Something that worked for me is to decide before hand, how many hours am I allowed to spend this week for each role.
If you read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I am designing and developing something that might help organizing your weeks as the Third Habit describes.
People learn in different ways
What helped me learn, might not help you at all, you might even find it confusing. We all have different brain structures and cognition has some nuances for all.
I found this while sharing resources with a mentee. Some like to read articles but find the documentation quite confusing. Other prefers to see crash courses videos, while a third one prefers to do pair programming.For me, videos with subtitles at twice the speed work like a charm, I can also just read the docs and start coding.
Do Whatever works best for you but don't give up on learning. Also be kind when you find someone less experienced with a different preference for learning resources.
Share what you know, there is greatness in you
The fact that you are solving real problems, even spending your free time learning more about your craft is something to be applauded. Specially when we always have things like Facebook, Twitter and Netflix to distract us.
Beware that most of your experiences if you choose so, make you smarter and better. Even your mistakes have value, if you learn from them, you become better, if you share that with us, we all are.
Cheers.
PS: If you are and experienced Node JS Dev with extensive experience on SaaS, Distributed Systems and multi-tenant applications I'd love to have you as a mentor. DMs are open at @papaponmx.
Top comments (2)
Good article Jaime! Jaime is a great mentor. Always patient and thoughtful in his approach. I'd definitely recommend him; if you can convince him to make time for you, then respect it, because you are getting someone very good.
Thanks for the kind words.