Mentoring over Coaching: Art of Mentoring "Bored" Techies

TLDR;

Because mentoring "bored software engineers" more than the excited ones is more exciting for me! 🙂 - So please reach out to me over social media channels or directly over here: Mentorship Application Form

Jokes aside, as my journey through mentoring in tech field for me is kinda new recently. I am learning while working on plans for anyone who is looking for a spark in their next step of their future horizon which can be sometimes not on eye-sight.

For achieving this, for mentees I am helping for with my 20+ years of experience within software engineering market, I am trying to help people who is eager to see some improvement along the way of their tech career on certain fields that they're expecting to get better at on a periodic basis. Monthly or daily, quarterly or weekly, no matter when. The only detail I am looking for is curiosity and some little excitement for learning together.

Achieving such a hard task in my personal goal todo list, cannot be also possible in a woobly plan but should be curated on a consistent plan. So here why you're reading these lines to get to know more about my mentoring strategy to help you for your improvement.

Why I Mentor

Kinda reason why you sometimes get bored to decide on things alone in your tech specialisation, so you're that type of person? Yes, I am also one of them.

Software engineering is half communication and the rest for the other rituals like implementation and shipping good quality software to the rest of the world. If talking on a certain topic by sharing ideas in between each other, trying to find a way to migrate some data from somewhere on cloud to some another or feeling stuck together on a problem which should be solved in an elegant way like scaling a web socket server are your thing, I am here for help you and myself. That what makes me excited to provide more help while learning together.

And that's the reason why I am mentoring: the more excited I get once I make others excited while collaborating on things on engineering and communication level.

What I Mentor with (aka. the Toolbox) It may take around an hour to tell all the list in my toolbox I've gained in my past working life but here are some of them for your attention to be considered which you will easily get familiar with while driving the mentoring sessions together: Project planning for pragmatic goal-based concrete results, Agile principles and beyond with self-structured project backlogs, Lean Development for reaching the goal of having an MVP level as soon as possible, Modern Web Development to learn how to ship a Functional Web App (FWA), Vertical Slicing for engineering practicality, Trunk-based Development without having branch hassle, Extreme Programming with immediate feedback enablement, Feature Flags for immediate product decision organism within a flexible environment, Stateful, Stateless and | or Serverless Microservices with a sense of art-of-state system design, Latest trends like Edge Computing and others.

... and list goes on with other things that will make you a better tech nerd.

So, how I mentor…

🛠️ Praxis: Learning by Building A (Side / Pet) Project

Practice comes with theory or theory getting bigger while having more practical experience, so-called Praxis. That's how I call it. General sense of having some practical experience of course comes from the theory itself in the current world but theory doesn't mean any "value" in the nervous system of finance capital. People who have enough time and energy alongside with a dedicated mindset are one step ahead from others which is also getting encouraged.

So that one step I mention comes with the practical experience gained through the Praxis level of development experience in general as it includes designing the system, coding the internals and shipping the project online while reading and enlarging the vision on building working projects. That's how me and my mentees prefer the way of interacting and learning while growing. That's fun, I promise! 😃

🏗️ Planning System Design & Architecture

How hard it can be to implement a small version of Instagram-like application, what to do once it comes to deciding on which database to be used in your next project, why should it be a matter of having an back-of-envelope calculation for your next big side-project which you're planning to provide a service to 1M visitor daily?

For sure, all of them have their own context to be evaluated for, so on this path, we're actively reviewing what you would like to solve from an engineering perspective. Discussing examples with use cases of similar concerns in terms of implementation from all aspects of managing a big system of running software piece in a pragmatic but detailed way. If you're only into system / architectural software design to get some idea at least, that's also nice because I have a huge list of topics to discuss with you! ;)

💾 Software Engineering & Programming

You're feeling so rusty in terms of implementing design patterns? Finding the best methodologies for solving a complex problem while implementing a fuzzy search in your application is still a detail you are not so proud of?

Even, maybe you're not feeling on a level that you imagine yourself of? That makes sense, because that means you're on the right path of getting more curious on how to get better on being a better software engineer.

We plan the topics together to jump in, organise a path with a set of key milestones as you can also build applications along side with an insightful review & feedback loop during the mentoring period. No worries, because noone is still not good at graph databases and Typescript Generics :)

👀 Assisting Code Reviews and Source Quality

If the idea also strikes you of not be able to stay calm once a code could be refactored as a one liner? Not always, but if that's something still readable, that's fine for now, maybe later.

No need for micro over-engineering on implementations. But it doesn't mean that we can keep our mode on under-engineering level which leaves the codebase with lots of defects to be revisited and refactored.

With the perception and awareness of code reviewing is a communicational process from the other side, there is always a need to improve for having a proper alignment with your colleague on your and|or their code at some point, so that's what we can talk here based on examples either from you and me.

🎤 Helping with Evaluating Resumes (CV) and Interviewing Skills

Not everyone comes up to the stage as an expert of what they've achieved in the past. So you may expect an improvement plan to be driven by communication skills with re-sharping the ability to give details of what you've achieved in the past in your technical field. That's not something one can get better at in one day, but needs a consistent working plan actually. So here a support opportunity along that path to perfectionism in interviewing skills is awaiting.

✅ Providing Career Advice

It applies a couple of stages of development careers for developers no matter if you're senior or junior, manager and|or tech lead, all good! I've been recently noticing people who has reached a certain level in their journey in tech, so a certain direction with guidance with clear goals may lead them succeeding in their path towards what they would like to see at. For achieving this, I am providing also a certain set of steps to be successful in your career.

For example, you're lost in your recent role as a Junior Developer and you would like to switch to being a polymath tech leader in your company as a next step or you're on a path of being a Software Architect but not sure what to choose as a next step along with a clear perspective, or even maybe you're not a techie but a tech-wannabe or maybe a beginner who would like to jump into software engineering but not so sure where to start. So you're a great candidate for the Career Path Plan I am providing based on a series of discussions we drive together for a certain period, like a month or so.

Then once you begin noticing the significant change on your working plan, we start planning the next steps, easy peasy!

📝 Evaluate writing

Most probably, there wouldn't be any other skill set which is expected in recent years on this scale ever. Since to be able to write what you think for a technical audience have different criteria than writing for a fashion blog or on a newspaper followed by a public audience. It requires a specific effort with a correct guidance assuming writing as an art as you're enjoying how your new article encourages feedback from people from different fields in tech.

Assessing the idea around a hypothesis, converting it into a set of sections within an article flowing after each other with am eye-catchy title telling what people can learn from are our main guidelines. Of course with ideation, reviewing, iterating and finalising support while you're getting excited with your next article topic. Maybe it is about WebAssembly use cases, maybe it is robotics in digital agriculture or maybe it is about the signalling-based communication in between two satellites in a gravity-free environment.

So amazing, I am also curious what kind of ideas you have which we can put onto web to inspire people!

🌐 Overall Growth with all Aspects of Engineering

You may feel that sometimes keeping lots of concepts on your memory and apply them based on some edge cases. That's normal because recent tech industry is not evolving on a stand-by momentum, instead pace and the momentum in programming language tooling ecosystem gets faster and bigger. That also forces us to calibrate our adaptability reflexes better than ever.

You may also feel that what to do with your feature on your backlog within an application but not so sure for how to move forward, basically one step ahead to be concluded and the rest will come quickly. So that's why helping individual tech people here is also so important as tech vision, horizon-check in combination of mentee's professional and personal interests and structuring a clear path towards being always curious with what you're up to is what we can do it good together.

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If you think that you may be one of my mentees, please consider go check the form here I've created for you all for the purposes of collecting demand.

Please also consider that I may not be able to answer within the same day you posted but the next day, you will have a greeting email in your inbox to start discussing what's your next goal in tech to help you! 😉

Here is your Mentorship Application Form and looking forward to getting in touch.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me on social media channels like below: Linkedin, Twitter & Github

And feel free to book any time over Calendly and | or Superpeer.

Thanks for reading!