Eight months ago, I gave a lecture on the basics of Big Data to a great group of people, who came to meet us, learn how is it to work for a startup, and take advice from the company’s employees.
During the lecture, one guy stood out the most for me, and I was quite surprised that even though he lacked experience, he knew how to answer a difficult question, which made me curious about his progress further down the line.
Weeks passed, and Doron Shamia, a Senior human resource personal at Glassbox and a dear friend of mine, approached me and asked if I want to take on some mentoring volunteering role, and this is how my connection with Shay has started.
First Session
My first meeting with Shay was at the establishment where he learned programming, where we initially listened to some speeches from mentors and students.
Later on, I sat with Shay, and my initial plan was to understand his needs from me and how am I able to assist him.
I began with a series of questions, which I recommend you to ask whenever you are discussing with a novice about how he wants to go about it. Here I’m also adding question which I should have asked:
- When you wish to learn a new topic or sharpen your skills on a particular subject which you are already familiar with, what’s the process of learning?
Here you should understand if the developer knows the correct procedure of learning a topic.Does the developer know any Online courses platforms? Which websites does he/she visits to extract details? is he reading any technical books? Is it sufficient enough? Does one also covers the basics or focuses on just what appears to be exciting?
- What subject interests you the most, what kind of developers do you want to become?
Full-stack? Backend? Frontend? Embedded? ML engineer? Or perhaps you want to forge your specific path later on. - What are your expectations of me?
What are you hoping to gain from this connection?
Remember, you are here to assist not control the developer’s path; it’s his or her choice on what type of help one gets from you. You may provide suggestions but do not try to enforce your way, as it’s something you should decide together.
For example, if the developer wants job interview practices only, that should be your focus and not going over subjects that an interviewer is not going to ask. - Can you provide me with some estimation on the amount of time you can dedicate to home works?
Unfortunately, as working developers, we can not dedicate 100% of our time to others; furthermore, the developer should know that, for the most part, an engineer should be autodidactic and know how to learn by oneself.
Your goal here is to provide tools on how to learn, how to progress, and how to become a better autodidactic developer.
To Summarize – your first session needs to be all over understanding the novice needs, and from there, you can start preparing for your first technical session.