[edw519]

“That guy doesn’t know shit. Why should I listen to him?"

If you have to ask that question, then you already know the answer.

With a good mentor, thoughts like that would never even enter your mind. Why? Because a good mentor would never just tell you what to do, he/she would share data in such a way that you would learn what to do.

If you don't find a way to turn mentor input into new actionable wisdom very quickly (even instantly) and feel confident about it, then it's probably time to find another mentor.

[rudasn]

Can you please elaborate on what you think is a good mentor, and how one may become a good mentor?

On that note, I've been considering of mentoring entry/medium-level developers for some time now but I seriously don't know what exactly that entails.

My goal is to help people understand and appreciate the importance of well formed, semantic HTML and CSS and unobtrusive javascript.

My belief is that all these different libraries/frameworks (Backbone, Angular, Bootstrap, Foundation, etc etc) confuse new comers and abstract them from actually learning the importance of well written HTML/CSS/JS in developer productivity and application maintenance.

Sometimes these libs make it very easy for developers to focus too much on short term gains at the expense of long-term maintainability and understanding what the code they publish actually does!

If anyone wants to help me become a mentor by mentoring them on HTML, CSS, JS please let me know.

[nahname]

Why not do a session/presentation/lunch&learn on how to build web apps without a library. Or how to build something like backbone. Showing teams how to test their front end code is also a great way to introduce better practices and more concern for quality.

The biggest challenge to being a mentor isn't wisdom, it is respect. The person you are trying to teach needs to respect you before they will be willing to learn from you.

[rudasn]

> Why not do a session/presentation/lunch&learn on how to build web apps without a library.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I think libraries are bad - on the contrary. It's just that I'm really puzzled by people who are willing to blindly use some piece of code, and build their codebase around that code, without even understanding what that library actually does. This mostly happens with CSS/HTML libraries which unfortunately are considered to be second-class citizens nowadays as opposed to javascript frameworks. No, your HTML/CSS is equally or more important than, dare I say, the javascript framework of the day.

> The biggest challenge to being a mentor isn't wisdom, it is respect. The person you are trying to teach needs to respect you before they will be willing to learn from you.

As a self-taught professional, I really don't understand this. I can see why that would be the case, but I still can't really "get it".

Respect is important, and it goes both ways, but I'm not sure if it's (or should be) something that happens before even having some interaction with the other person.

I may respect the work someone has done but it doesn't necessarily mean that I respect them as a teacher (although learning from someone's work is still on the table) because I don't know beforehand how good of a teacher they are. At the same time, I may not respect the work someone has done but it doesn't mean I have nothing to learn from them.

[Macsenour]

This is what I tried to tell a conference promoter. He listed companies for his mobile conference, as speakers, that had all published bad or failed apps.

He response was to delete me from the mailing list. Best way to deal with a dissenting voice, delete it.

[dfriedmn]

We've mentor about 75 students in front-end development at Thinkful (thinkful.com) – we're actually working with a team of about 12 mentors now. If you'd like to join, feel free to reach out (email is dan at thinkful). We've learned a ton about best practices for how to help beginners learn over the last 6 months of doing it.

[rudasn]

Cool, e-mail sent!