Ask HN: Would you please be my mentor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you please be my mentor?

12 pointsjoeclef7 comments

Dear HN Community, My name is Joe Jean. I'm from Haiti. I'm a Junior studying Computer Science at NYU in Abu Dhabi. I would like to become a better programmer. I'm reaching out to see if any one would be willing to help me improve faster by being my mentor.

My technical background: I have coded mostly in Python, but I have also done a little bit of Java and C. I recently started coding in JavaScript. I would like to specialize in Python and JavaScript(for now). Please check out my Github: https://github.com/joejean.

What I expect from you as a mentor: - Two hours per month where you would review my code, I would ask you questions, we would talk about tech in general. This interaction can be through email, Skype, Google Hangout whatever is more convenient for you. - You have industry experience.

I promise not to waste your time, to be forever grateful and to pay it forward by helping other people. If you would like to be my mentor please either comment here with your contact information or just shoot me an email(joe[at]joejean.net). Thank you so much.

Any constructive feedback about this post itself are also welcome. Thanks HN.

I don't think you will find a mentor that way. Instead, I'd suggest you to go to stackoverflow or various programmers forums with your questions. Stackoverflow is more for straight forward questions ("I have this code, it's suppose to do this, but instead it does that"), and you can find other forums to ask more "abstract" question ("is this code good?", "what is the most efficient way to do X?", etc.).

Good luck!

Agreed. Your mentor shouldn't be reviewing your code. That stuff is meant for the forums. You should tell your mentor about your program what it's doing and how it's doing it. He/She can tell you the best approach from there.

you can find other forums to ask more "abstract" questions

Could you name a few? I am often looking for places to ask unspecific questions of experienced programmers.

reddit's language-specific subreddits are a good casual place to start (although they can be surprisingly sparse)

for code reviews you can use http://codereview.stackexchange.com

and for python code review and feedback, try http://reddit.com/r/learnpython/ , it's a great subreddit with lots of helpful senior members.

Apart from the links the other commenters mentioned, there is IRC as well. I don't go there too often, but I came here with some "abstract" questions and I was well received - the last time I went, I asked in #python on freenode the most "pythonic" way to do something.

I'd be happy to. Email is in my profile. I have a strong JS background.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com