Mentoring
noun · skill · element 37 of 117
Helping other people get good at the work: pairing, code review, explaining the why as well as the how, and standards a team can follow on its own.
- In my work since
- 2021
- Family
- Engineering
What is Mentoring?
Mentoring in software is the slow, useful work of making other people better at the job. It happens in code review, in pairing on a hard bug, in onboarding notes, and in explaining why a pattern exists rather than only how to copy it.
Good mentoring leaves standards behind: guidelines a team can follow when the mentor is not in the room, and juniors who start reviewing each other.
How I use Mentoring
I have led and taught developers for most of my career. At TeamQ I led a remote team of more than ten developers across clients in four countries. At Jonas I set up the onboarding, the code review process and the widget guidelines for the web team.
Since 2024 I have taught web development at Conestoga College as a part-time professor, and before that I was an on-call teaching assistant on the University of Toronto UX/UI bootcamp.
- TeamQ DevelopersLed 10+ developersTeamQ Developers · 2021 to 2025
- Jonas Club SoftwareOnboarding and code reviewJonas Club Software · 2022 to 2024
- Conestoga CollegeTeachingConestoga College · 2024 to now