Work, Learning, All Of It

For the longest time, I have thrived and benefited from the many resources available in the tech community: blog posts, articles, videos, courses - all of them created by other programmers, contributors. Often shared for free, sometimes behind a (rightful) paywall - in all cases, extremely helpful. If I've been able to change my career, and the course of my life in the process, it is also thanks to this.

After having spent some years learning and working towards that transition, and almost three years in the new career, I realised I was no longer happy with just taking, I wanted to give back.

I started considering mentoring, but I didn't feel fully confident in supporting someone with their career in all of its aspects, not yet at least. The responsibility felt too daunting, but I could provide help in bite-sized portions, maybe?

Exercism

Enter Exercism, offering the opportunity to mentor other students on their solutions to the challenges. Perfect opportunity to start growing those mentoring muscles.

Today I've given my first two "mentoring" sessions. Having received mentoring previously, I was sometimes left disappointed as some mentors were doing the bare minimum and not putting much effort in their answers, so I made sure my answers were exhaustive, detailed and well thought-out.

It felt good to try and go the extra mile to help somebody else who's on the same path. There's something about helping another human being grow and progress that speaks to most spiritual part of us - this, I think, is what attracts me the most to mentoring, in addition to the career aspect of it.

*If you're learning something and just keeping it for yourself, then what's the point? *

Frontend Mentor

A similar argument can be made for Frontend Mentor (hint is in the name...), offering a very similar feature. Here, I feel I will struggle a lot more as my CSS and Design skills are somewhat lacking, but I'm working hard on bringing them up to speed. Some of my feedback has already been marked as helpful, which was certainly a nice feeling that brought some much needed validation in these dark days.

Thoughts

All in all, this feels like an okay start on the path to hopefully provide even more help in the future. I will have to work hard to be a good mentor and there are only positives to find in this effort, in this beautiful striving (and struggling...).

Have you mentored someone or are you currently? What advice would you have for aspiring mentors?