Session

My aim with this talk is to inspire folks to try a hand at mentorship.

I’ll cover the example of peers having attended a Rails Girls workshop and then a few months later being a mentor at one. Mentorship is relative, and loads of initiatives are structured this way! That being said, I believe the intended audience can be relative newcomers to programming.

An outline is as follows:

• Clarifications: Mentorship vs training vs teaching
• Volunteering mentorship (Personal examples: Teaching children, Rails Girls Summer of Code, workshops)
• Mentorship best practices
• At the workplace (Onboarding a junior developer to a recent codebase)
• Conclusions, further reading

Takeaways/topics covered include:

• Responsibility in leaving an impression on a newer programmer
• Encouraging good habits
• Being supportive
• Learning alongside mentees
• Admitting when you don’t know the answer or the solution to something
• Letting mentees voice their ideas
• Starting out as a mentor (finding places to mentor)
• Communities of practise
• Showing mentees your problem-solving process
• Sharing the joy of sharing knowledge