It’s not about lifestyle coaching or other brainwashing rubbish. Purely engineering topic.

There is a point in our career when we need support. It’s great if we have a manager or a team lead, who can help you with that. If they can help you with deciding a learning path, with setting a career goal, with providing constructive feedback on your skills and at least Pull Requests. Yet, unfortunately, it’s not always the case.

I started mentoring teammates when I was a CTO of my own company. Helping new joiners to get onboard, develop required knowledge, confidence and skills. Now I’m providing mentoring support via the platform Mkdev or directly. There are all sorts of people, who may benefit from such help. In my experience, here are the usual categories:

• new grads, searching for the first job;
• job shifters, already having some understanding and basic hands-on experience;
• experienced Frontend developers/Ops people or mobile engineers, willing to get Fullstack/Backend;
• experienced engineers, willing to get hands-on with the AWS;
• junior to senior developers, who don’t have enough support at work and want somebody to help them to start writing more clean, robust code.

I believe in T-Shaping and a have a vast amount of skills I can use at work, however, I’m trying to mentor only in those fields, I feel super-confident at.

Categories I mentor and can advise at:

• Programming in general for new grads, job-shifters.
• Backend. Ruby/Rails. SQL/NoSQL databases. Junior-Senior mentoring.
• Distributed systems. Microservices architecture, Serverless.
• Cloud infrastructure on AWS.

We can also talk about JavaScript, including both Frontend (ReactJS) and Backend, or Go, or public clouds such as Google Cloud, however, it’s not my forte at the moment.

There are two formats of interactions I got used to. The first one is chat based communication. We pick some messaging service, like Telegram/Whatsapp/Gitter and stick to it. There we first set a learning goal for you and I prepare a proposal on how can we go towards it. Then along the way we communicate when you face some issues or have some questions. Besides that our communication is regularly happening on the Pull Requests, which you’re creating. Another format is a one-time voice consultation. It is usually 30-90 minutes format, where I can answer your questions and give you advice on the mentioned topics. In the voice format, it is also possible to do interview training, because I was conducting interviews in different companies, for different customers, and with different candidates, thus have solid experience at it.

Mentoring support can be important on any stage of your career. Being a senior engineer with more than 10 years of professional experience, I can say, how important it is, when you feel support from your peers and management. Or if you lack this support – from someone else, who can drive you forward. Please, don’t hesitate, use the contact form below.