In my past I have learned a lot from others, but have had few people that I would call a mentor. There was my first Ordnance Chief, my Instructor Pilot, and my OIC in Japan. Only one of these people have been technical, yet they have helped me in my journey along the way. I label them mentors because they taught me more about myself and helped me grow.
My last mentor was actually my manager in my first software development role outside of the Marine Corps. She has provided me with a lot of information on how the software industry works, business in corporate environments and dealing with other developers. She is an excellent judge of people and is usually right on in her assessments. She’s kind of a “Geek Whisperer”. What she helped me learn about myself was more about validation, that I could stand with (or on) other developers in the real world.
Lucky for you, you’ll probably get this info for free now. She has launched WebDevRocks!
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Hey Ryan,
I hear you about “validation”. It’s hard to kind of gauge yourself among other people out there. When I landed my first TRUE .NET (only) dev role working for a comapany that provided GIS mapping application for utilities, I was working with old C++ devs, some of who migrated to C#. I studied for 3 weeks to get that job and was happy to know that I was the top candidate when they hired me.
After about 4 months of working there, I quickly realized that I was right up there with some of the vets. Yeah, they had more experience, but I was able to keep up with them and I even showed a few some cool .NET stuff. They are using my MiniDevSerializer library in one of their apps and they even took parts of that for other apps. To have them validate your skills by using something you created, not for work, but presented to them in hopes that it might help make life easy in some respects was awesome validation for me.
I often hold back on releasing stuff because I’m afraid of what other “better” developers might say about the code. Now that I’m working for LVS, I have Dave (Xpando) as a mentor and he’s simply a brilliant developer and has instantly increased my skillset as well as validated my skills. Having that come from him was a huge boost in confidence.
FWIW, the way you present yourself, the way you’ve presented your answers.. it really shows that you know your stuff.
-Jim
It has been my pleasure and I hope our paths will cross again in the future.