Hi! This is a quick guide on how to contact me for mentoring, what to expect, and how to make the most of my mentoring. For a quick reference on who I am, please reference my previous self-introduction article.
You’re probably busy, I’m probably busy. We should maximize our time together and make sure we both get everything we can out of it.
To that end, if we have a call scheduled make sure you have all the information you need ready to go at our appointed time. Code editors open, ideas written down that you need help on, any reference material, video conference link ready. I don’t mind a bit of waiting, but if you aren’t ready it wastes the time we’ve set aside.
If you’re only messaging me for a quick, few-sentence answer that I can respond to on my own time, the burden is much lower. Just try to have your messages contain as much relevant info as possible because it’s going to get you the answers you want faster.
I want to help you achieve your real goals.
If your real goal is to automate your work so that you can play guitar in the afternoon while still making money, let me know. I’m not going to tell anyone your secrets.
If you want to make 100k USD in a year, I want to know that so I can manage your expectations depending on your life circumstances and skill set.
If you want to only learn programming so you can make cute avatars that dance around your house on LED screens, fine, no problem.
I can’t help you do what you really want if you don’t tell me what that is. So please, tell me.
One of the hardest things about getting into anything new is not knowing what to ask. Or, put differently, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” I want you to think clearly about goals that you have, but it’s okay if you can’t articulate yourself very well.
“I want to make a service that helps people eat food more often by texting them if they haven’t opened the fridge for more than 6 hours. I want to use Golang to do it!” is great, but “I want to make a service that can like, sense when the fridge is closed for too long and tell people so they can eat” is just as good!
But what I don’t expect is for you to say “I want to make a locally-hosted IoT cluster that has sensors to watch movement in the fridge door and facial detection running on a minipc in a Docker container that….” ← This is a professional level of detail, and if you can articulate your wants this precisely, you probably don’t need this kind of mentorship, you need a consultant.
I briefly mentioned this before, but if you have no programming experience, you almost certainly are not going to get a job paying 100k USD in your local area in less than 1 year unless your town happens to have an insane cost of living.
Most programming, with dedication, takes between 4-6 months of part-time study (some nights and all weekends) to get a good job - “good” here being defined as better than most starting salaries for new grads getting into programming for the first time.