Your Mentor and You
One of the pieces of advice I see riddled throughout every resource about learning to code is to find a mentor. I have no doubt that this is good advice, I have had a mentor since I started coding and the guidance he has provided has been incredibly valuable to me, but one thing I have never seen in those resources is an explanation of what the mentor-mentee relationship generally looks like and how to approach it.
I was lucky. I had a mentor the second I started coding. My mentor is the guy who persuaded me to try out coding in the first place, so not only is he interested in my development but I can guilt trip him into helping me if he ignores me for too long 😉. On a more serious note, finding a mentor can be easy for some and hard for others, but one thing we all will have in common is that the relationship is always going to be unique.
When I started out my mentor lived in Norway, a seven-hour time difference. My mentor did his best to make himself available as often as possible for questions and help, but my prime coding hours - sometime after 6:30 pm - were when he was asleep. The situation ended up being non-issue, there are a wealth of fantastic resources that can get you started, so only having him available for random questions at random times worked out fine. It was when I finally felt I could move on from the basic tutorials and beginner courses that I started running into problems.
One of the things I've had the most trouble with while learning to code is transferring the skills I've learned in the tutorials to larger projects. Most of the courses I've looked at, so far, whether they are beginner, intermediate, or even more advanced courses, still focus on a specific isolated problem or situation. If your experience has been anything like mine you've asked yourself the following: where do I start if I want to build a full-fledged app? I have all this knowledge about front-end JavaScript and its infinite space-time continuum of tools and frameworks, SQL and NoSQL databases, rest API's and graphQL, back-end systems with node js and java, but how do I piece it all together?
Enter mentor.
But how do you get your mentor to help you with all of this? He or she just...does? It might sound like a ridiculous question, but it's what I originally thought and I'm willing to bet other mentees have thought the same. The truth is, any mentor worth your time doesn't have an abundance of disposable time to guide you through building your app. They have their own lives, jobs, and side projects.
Not long after I started really needing my mentor's guidance he got news from his employer that they were bringing him back to the US a few months early. I was ecstatic. Not only was one of my best friends finally going to be back in the US, but I would have my mentor back to help me through building all of my apps. We all know this wasn't how it worked out.
Shortly after getting back to the US my friend found a girlfriend. Add his heavy workload and his own personal projects and he had no extra time to guide me. At first, I tried looking for a new mentor. I'm not the most outgoing individual in the world so that plan didn't bear much fruit. Fortunately, I realized my approach was all wrong. I made the age old assumption that it was about me, I was the one learning after all. But if I really wanted a mentor, especially a really good one, I needed to focus on making it worth his time and forget about myself
My mentor has been wanting to build a video game out of an idea he's had rolling around in his head for a long time. He's going to build it with one of his colleagues, but they've had a little trouble finding time to develop it together because of tight schedules at work. My mentor didn't want to drop the project altogether, so he decided to make a minigame based on some of the ideas they have for the main game. After telling me a little bit about where he wanted to take the new project, he asked if I wanted to help. Of course, I wanted to help, I love video games, and his ideas are all pretty awesome, so the decision was kind of a no-brainer. A couple of days later he said he was really intent on making this mini-game happen and asked if he could count on me to work on it. I was blindsided by the question. Could he count on me? How much would he expect from me? Would I have time for it if he expected a lot? He was using unity and c#, both of which I have very little experience with, I have a one year old son, a new job, my own portfolio to build, my blog...so I just said... Yes.
I realized that an opportunity to work closely with my mentor was staring me right in the face. What I wanted from the very beginning was right there in front of me and I almost passed it up because I was too focused on myself.
As my epiphany was playing itself out, I remembered my mentor has always toyed with the idea of starting his own business. I thought this might be a good chance for him to try his hand at "managing" an employee, so after I said "Yes" I took it one step further. I told him that he could count on me and to feel free to give me due dates for assignments and I'd treat them as if they were for my job. That got him excited, he didn't say it, but I could tell by his response that he knew he could count on me.
I've completed one assignment so far and I probably learned more in that one week I worked on it than any other four weeks combined.
Mentor's are awesome, but they have their own lives to worry about. We need to shift our perspective and focus on what is worth their time. I guarantee it will be worth ours.