Ask HN: How to Mentor?

I've been a software developer for more than 30 years. I've been involved in the open source movement since the mid-1980s. At my age (nearly 56), if I worked for a conventional corporation, I'd like to imagine that I'd be the curmudgeonly old guy that younger programmers simultaneously viewed as awesome, intimidating and irrelevant. In short, I'd be a mentor!

But I'm not that person, because for the last two decades, I've been writing Ardour (an open source DAW that gets started somewhere in the world every 3 minutes), along with JACK (a cross-platform framework for inter-application routing of audio and MIDI). I work at home with an amazing (though small) team of folks who coordinate on IRC and very occasionally meet up in person. Before that, I was the 2nd programmer at Amazon, and before that spent 4-1/2 years in the CS&E department at UWashington, as a staff programmer working on parallel systems and OS research.

So why not mentor more contributors to Ardour?

Ardour is not the easiest project to get involved with: it is massively multithreaded, incredibly complex, has real-time code and a complex GTK GUI. It is written in C++, which only the most dedicated developers these days seem willing to get into, perhaps due to the complexities of the build process. We have a long list of people who have contributed over the years, but we're not a port of call for most developers these days for whom things like React, WebRT, JSX and webasm are more "their thing".

I was a mentor in each of the several years that Ardour participated in GSoC. Recently I've been wondering what to do, if anything, with the knowledge/skills that I've accumulated. I am very grateful for being able to live a self-directed life, entirely from an open source project without any corporate backing. But at the same time, this unorthodox career path leaves me lacking in opportunities for mentoring, either informally or formally.

So what to do? Relax and enjoy being an old fart?