Show HN: Codementor – instant one-to-one mentor for programming and design | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codementor – instant one-to-one mentor for programming and design

codementor.io

132 pointsweitingliu73 comments

This is essentially what I was attempting with http://beginner.org, and we were using Screenhero. The biggest issue I encountered was on the scheduling side; it's difficult to coordinate dates/times and availability between two people with potentially different levels of commitment. If you can figure out a way to reach a critical mass of available mentors across each of these languages and frameworks so that you can truly offer "instant" mentoring on demand, this will be sweet. Incidentally, we're shifting to a self-teaching model because we couldn't overcome the scheduling challenges.

I agree with you. Their biggest challenge will be scheduling. Their goals are quite noble but I think they should retract the "instant" promise because if they want to be selective in their mentor pool, they're going to have trouble meeting that.

ETA: what kinds of hourly rates do tutors tend to make? I'm just curious how that market plays out.

We asked tutors what they wanted to charge per hour, and the average was ~$35 (from 96 submissions).

Did you vet for quality/capability?

What I'm afraid of in this space is that you're going to have a mix of (a) unaffordable good ones and (b) cheap, less capable people.

It depends on location and opportunities but half-decent freelancers tend to be over $100/hour where I am (New York). People will work at a lower rate for good-citizen reasons (and because they care about the technologies, want to meet new people) but that component is limited and will never get to on-demand service.

That's exactly right. The good-citizen effect works against you, because even the most talented developers with the best intentions to help others won't be as committed or available as the middling developer who actually needs the money. Quality control became an issue almost immediately for us, and managing that component can become a FT job rather quickly. I think this can work, but probably has a better chance as a Kumon-type model where you have much tighter QA over your mentors and can provide a consistent experience to learners.

But teaching will only make the middling developer better. Trust me, this won't be the first time students labor under less-than-perfect teachers. At least these will be motivated.

In our experience, and with companies that have large teams of teachers training is the most important piece of all this.

Pointing out freelancer rates in major cities is also not representative: Lower cost of living cities have lower market rates for freelancers. When you're delivering the service over the web as we do with http://www.thinkful.com/ each party (the freelancer and the hirer) can split the cost savings.

Beautiful execution...congrats Darrell!

When I've tutored for web development and CS I've surprisingly been able to change the same as my freelance rates. This might suggest that I don't charge enough for freelancing, but I charge above my hourly rate at work and live comfortably in the bay area.

What if money was involved from both parties? I do not think it will be a complete solution but was wondering if incentive & penalty variables will keep people committed. Like a deposit structure?

Take a look at how Dan Martell's clarity.fm handles the scheduling issues.

They have a really nice "rule of 3" UI process (it's easier for humans to pick 3 times, or narrow 1 of 3) for each side selecting availability, and then match down from there through a back-and-forth until a mutual fit happens.

As a business/purpose model, it's quite similar; one side wants consultation and the other wants to get paid. This means it should be solving very similar commitment level issues when it comes to the scheduling hurdles.

in terms of scheduling times, dates.. i would recommend appointlet.com. I use it everyday. I can set my own times, gaps, and am able style the modal to mimic our own styles and remove any branding.

You should have the option of free mentoring in return for free mentorship. For example, I'm proficient enough in JavaScript, ruby, and c# to mentor others and even charge for it. But if its not a very intense schedule, I'd happy to do it for free in return for free mentorship of something I am currently learning (such as Haskell or iOS development). So if I get credits for free mentoring that I can use to pay other mentors, that would be sweet. Though i suppose I might as well just charge for the mentoring I do and pay other mentors for that money.

I second this idea

There's a lot of demand right now for expert-level 1-on-1 code mentoring. Traditional education doesn't come close to providing the skills needed for modern development, and while the resources are available to learn on your own, beginners naturally don't have the intuition for what resources are high quality/best practice. In fact, the lack of intuition I think is a ceiling for the usefulness of online tutorials such as http://codecademy.com. No matter how advanced they get, eventually you need someone to step in with expert guidance to make sure you're on the right track.

Disclaimer: I teach programming 1-on-1 at http://collegecoding.com.

Since moving all my teaching to Skype, I've increased my rates from $35 to $45 to $55 to $65/hr since October. It's just that high quality 1-on-1 instructors are hard to find, and opening up to teaching online gives you access to a large market. I know that learning coding with me is saving my clients a ton of time if they were to try on their own. Perhaps my rates are still too low.

Personally I'm thrilled that services like on-demand mentoring are starting to be offered right now. It's a great time to experiment with new ways of teaching technologies. I've been thinking myself about the best way to scale this.

Looks good! First of all, I honestly wish you will find (or have already found) a workable business model for this. Connecting people with experience to people seeking help/advice worldwide in a 1:1 fashion is a concept that extends beyond coding. Choosing coding as the niche market to attend to first is probably a good idea, given the tech savviness and available funds of your target audience, but I have high hopes for a general 1:1 knowledge exchange platform emerging from one of these projects. I myself have built a 1:1 learning/teaching web app during last year's Rails rumble (http://goteachly.com), but failed to find a reasonable business model following that. The dreamer in me hates to give up on that one.

Fingers crossed, weitingliu.

http://pearl.com has a good headstart on this, although I think it's limited by the single question/single answer format.

I'm sorry to hear you couldn't find a model to make it work – would love to learn more! You can email me directly darrell@thinkful.com

This is awesome. What's funny to me, and this is reflected in the comments here, is that people don't think this kind of service can scale. That is completely wrong.

Human-powered backends to internet services should not be nearly as scary to startups as people currently think. From telesales teams to customer support, and now mentoring / teaching it's all proving very possible.

In our market research for http://www.thinkful.com/ we found several beginners who described (WORD FOR WORD) access to experts like that which you provide as "the holy grail" of learning.

Best of luck!

Ideas like this and http://airpair.com are really exciting to me. Being able to summon an expert on demand and quickly solve problems outside of your expertise sounds great. Check out http://www.meetup.com/remotepairprogrammers/ if you're interested in a "free version" of this concept.

I'm a self-taught software engineer and I can say with confidence a product like this is 1000x more valuable for the student. Enforce the mentor's schedule and this could really take off, I will certainly be using / paying for it

Wow - that's great to hear. I'm too embarrassed to put our company's URL in this comment because it'd be too obviously advertising. But man, are we doing exactly what you're asking for!

Nice! I'll check out Thinkful, I might need something a bit more advanced / focused on Rails tho

Is there any reason to limit the amount of languages you can get mentored in? I would be interested in using this if it was available for Clojure.

Oddly enough, I signed up to mentor but don't have enough experience with any of the listed languages to do so.

I decided this spring to come back to Clojure (which I used in 2008-11) because, while I prefer static typing (slightly, although it's 51/49 for most projects) the community is one of the best out there.

I think the O'Reilly reference is a great starting point, and after that there's the Joy of Clojure, which is covers some solid territory.

The community is very helpful, so that's one thing to keep in mind. Don't be afraid to ask questions in the way one might in some other language communities.

Yeah the the community is incredibly helpful, but sometimes I wish there was one person I could just unload all of my questions at once to get a tighter feedback loop going. I think in the end there probably isn't much I already couldn't find out on my own or with the help of others for free, but this process could be a lot more efficient if I had an actual mentor.

Where do you live? It's probably harder to find what you're looking for in some places than others.

Have you tried using it at work? That will speed you along a lot faster. People fetishize after-hours work in this industry, but the truth is that it's usually better if you can find a way to make your day-job synergize with what you want to do in the long term.

We're focusing on a few selected categories in the beginning. Clojure is certainly what we'd like to get to next!

I had the same experience, but my greatest area of expertise is in Haskell.

I think you should definitely have things like C, C++, and so on.

This is where I wish I knew how far along the product was. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing whether this is just an email sign up page to gauge interest or if the product is close to being ready to ship.

I hope it's the latter because I am very interested. A blog from the team would be a good thing to setup next.

airpair.com is working and we can service you straight away.

Nice. Just signed up and created an application. Excited to see what may come out of this. I'm more interested in pairing with somebody who's better than me rather than working on a specific problem of my choice so hopefully someone can help!

I like the approach that http://airpair.com took, they let the mentors choose their desired rate. They also let the students choose from a list of qualified applicants.

AirPair charges $20/h to not make the video public. That's completely nonsense. And $60/h for NDA. Outrageous.

We encourage the videos to be public so:

1) The knowledge is opensourced 2) The experts can build their online presence and prove their knowledge

about 1) where do I can access your opensourced knowledge, then?

Is it just me or was it not clear that this would cost money?

You're not alone... where does it say that? If I had known I wouldn't have signed up. But it makes sense from the perspective of attracting mentors, though to some degree I think you'd get more engagement if it was only volunteer (studies show professionals are way more likely to do work for pro bono than middling amounts of money)

I think that's the difference in terminology between "mentor" and "tutor."

With "tutor" it's clear that you are going to be paying for tutelage.

A mentorship is supposed to be an ongoing relationship with a single individual that is not necessarily fee-based --someone you just have a chat with and get advice from.

This seems less like a mentor site and more like either a tutor site or a contractor site where you are getting contracted help on problems or understanding.

Same. I signed up before I saw this and I probably wouldn't have too.

Not one mention of charges on the whole website.

I think it would be very useful to have a more detailed language specification. For example I am experienced with JavaScript and Node.js programming but I have no clue how to code for browsers properly. Also additional languages like C# and C++ would be nice ( just to name the ones I'm familiar with, but of course there are a lot more ). If that would improve I'd try out mentoring, I really like the Idea!

I really like this idea but I think your categories are confused and confusing.

First, I was disappointed to see the lack of a 'design' option. Then I wondered whether you could be a designer or a code mentor for each category. But designing for Ruby isn't really different to designing for Python (unless you're designing a framework etc).

HTML/CSS is not design it's coding. Designing for HTML/CSS is certainly a technical design skill.

Similarly iOS & Android present distinct design challenges despite both being 'mobile'. I'd be happy to advise on iOS design but would feel uncomfortable in advising on Android as I'm unsure about the native idioms.

Could I suggest you add design categories for Visual design, Web design, UI/UX design, iOS design, Android design.

You might want to consider copywriting too as it's a tricky and often overlooked part of the creative process (and something that certain YC alumni are naturally very good at).

I would love to invite a mentor into a pythonanywhere console, or a pythontutor session. However, I tend to agree that without credentialing, it's hard to pony up dough for something like this. I find most people who answer student questions just like answering student questions.

Are you talking about credentialing for the student or for the mentors?

Mentors. The patient doesn't need credentials, the doctor does.

Ah – gotcha. It's interesting: We do get asked about the qualifications of the mentors by students before they start the class. But degrees and accreditation rarely matter.

What we've learned is that people want to be taught by those with experience – just like you want to be mentored by a co-worker with a lot of experience.

Virtually all of our students have full-time jobs, so perhaps this insight applies more to our market than others.

Also note that most education for adults advertises the _real world_ experience and prominence of their professors, rather than from where they received a degree.

there are still reasonable metrics that could be applied:

http://www.starling-software.com/employment/programmer-compe...

Like the idea! Would be nice to add server admin kinda stuff as an option too, in addition to coding.

This is exactly what I need right now.

Hey, shoot me an email anthony@makerops.com, Id be happy to help out.

After I sign up to be a mentor, you said "spread the word".I think this is one of the few times where I have looked for social icons, so I can +1 it on google+. Other than that looks good. That form for applying to be a mentor could be a lot more specific and cleaned up!

Love it. I'm a new, self-teaching programmer and have been thinking how great something like this would be, but assumed it couldn't possibly exist. And for me, I don't really need immediate response. First I'd love email access for moderately hot issues - say a couple hour turnaround. Second, I'd love code reviews - "look at this and tell me how I could have done it better". Finally would be one to one back and forths, but I could schedule that days in advance.

This would be a great addition to a site like Stack Exchange. There's another site that does something similar to Stack Exchange and Code Mentor.

http://JustAnswer.com have exerts in law, computers, plumbing, etc. standing by to answer your questions live and keep previous questions and answers public to drive more traffic.

Upvote the SE recommendation.

Looked at the screenshot, is this using some sort of integration with Screenhero? After playing/using Screenhero, I've been excited about the possibility of incorporating it into web apps.

Yes we're currently using Screenhero and enjoying it thus far!

Oh, bummer. I just signed up as a mentor and now I see that Screenhero is only available for Mac and windows.

But I'm a Linux-only guy. Bummer.

Guess you could set up XP in a VirtualBox specifically for this purpose.

I know Teamviewer is compatible with Linux (They use a pre-configured WINE/Mono type build, alike Picasa for Linux). Used it myself and it works as well as the native thing on both ends.

Nice. Mentoring on demand. What will your pricing model be?

Thanks! You can name your own rate (in 15-min increments).

What percentage do you take? What levels do you think the market will reach for, say, qualified mentors in <X>?

When you get real numbers, there's a lot you could do with this data. For example, if Ruby tutors make 20% more than Python tutors, there's an economic signal there. While the raw data might seem limited in use, there are a lot of open questions about the programming economy that one could start answering.

Especially powerful would be to capture code from remote pairing sessions and get some quality-labelled samples (labels by tutor price level) and perhaps (many years later) attack the automated code-quality assessment problem (on which well-labelled data is very rare).

I asked for someone to build this kind of service earlier today. Pretty cool to now see it already exists. Looking forward trying it out.

I would say machine learning & cloud need more expertise coaching than just programing languages.

Hate to be off-topic but does anyone know how the Sublime Text theme they are using is called?

i wonder what happened to real programmers working on real problems...

like programming embedded systems in C++

like writing enterprise software in Java

I agree those are less sexy than RoR + HTML5 + CSS3, but still commercial software is a huge market.

Whoa! Where did 'writing enterprise software in Java' come from? Didn't see that coming!

I am one of the first users of airpair :) Great service!

hrm, co-dementor. interesting choice of name ;)

I had the exact same thought! I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality [1] and Harry Potter and the Natural 20 [2], so at least I have an excuse.

[1] http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

[2] http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-N...

Great stuff! I could use something like this :)

Great idea.

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