There’s simply no avoiding it - the obligatory reference, a cliché, the beginning to yet another software developer’s blog.
After a few days, of fighting with Gatsby and GitHub actions I’m about ready to start writing stuff. Maybe some of my first posts will be about Gatsby, GitHub Actions, Azure Static Web Apps, or all of the above and that might help someone. More on that later.
Dedication
I’d like to dedicate my first blog post to Scott Hanselman - a worthy role model for any aspiring blogger and technologist. I watched one of his recent talks he gave for the 2021 NDC Melbourne conference on Mentorship, Storytelling and Sponsorship. Scott made some very astute points about the value of and better approaches to mentoring, such as lending your privilege, sponsorship, and his other thoughts on the principles behind mentorship - I cannot do his talk justice by repeating it in my own words, so I encourage anyone to watch the video published by NDC.
Save your keystrokes
One of the reasons I started this blog was (to borrow Scott’s phrase) to ‘save my keystrokes.’ To save others (as well as my future self) the effort of learning things the hard way. I have learned so many things about problem solving, debugging, asking the right questions (of people, and of Google), that it only makes sense to distil my own learnings into a format that makes sense to me, and I hope it makes sense to others.
Like all things, many of the learnings that I write about will have a shelf-life, if I write about some way to overcome some technology challenge today, or some difficulties I had with an API, I know that some of these things will pass into obsolescence, and that’s okay. But if I can write something that stays relevant for a while, and helps someone save a bit of time, then it will have been worth writing.
Other times I might just write about my own opinions, but I’m sure they will be timeless.
Reflections
I really gravitate towards discussions about mentorship. The kind of mentorship where you’re walking the path alongside your mentee, I remember some years ago when the company I work for wanted to show recognition and appreciation for employees that demonstrate our values, I saw an opportunity to suggest another trait that our company should want to recognise and reward - and so I suggested we have an award for mentorship. It must have been something I was doing well that year, because without solicitation or discussing it with my colleges, my peers voted for me and I handily won the same award I suggested we should have.
Admittedly, it’s been some years since I was recognised as formally as that time for my efforts to mentor new and less experienced members joining our team. The opportunity to mentor doesn’t always fall neatly on your lap and you have to seek it out. For me, as a developer, it has been easy for me to let myself be swept up in the moment of playing the hero in projects, eager to receive a different kind of recognition that comes with blazing the trail, but sometimes I reflect on some of those times as having an opportunity cost, that of not bringing others along for the journey.
Balance
As anyone interested in their own prospects and career can appreciate, there might appear as if there is a balance one must strike between building up others careers versus building up your own. Indeed, depending on the type of career path you’re wanting to pursue it might look like there’s an opportunity cost to spending your own time to nurture someone else’s career at the expense of your own. Perhaps it wont always benefit the mentor, but my own experience leads me to believe that, more often than not, you stand to gain from the experience of being a mentor.
There can be many ways that the benefit of this can manifest itself. It might be paid back in the experience you gain as a communicator, it might exercise and improve your empathy in ways that you don’t otherwise experience in the course of your daily teamwork. It might turn into valuable professional relationships that extend beyond teamwork, a deeper connection and trust. It might be paid forward in the form of happy, willing and trustworthy advocates/references that support your future career prospects.
Mentorship is a symbiotic relationship that isn’t as simple as give and take.