mentoring

How to mentor a junior programmer

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to mentor a junior programmer ? If you have mentored someone did you follow any process or was it quite informal ? If you've been mentored in the past what kind of things did you find most helpful ? ...

How to find a mentor?

I need a mentor, that shows me the forgotten art of programming. I'm after the 10x productivity factor. What social skills or tricks to use, to capture a mentor? ...

How do you teach the stuff that good programming is made of?

In my company we get on and off shore contractors in and out all the time. It is hard to maintain a code base like that since the level of maturity in writing code varies considerably. To a certain extent my role consists of mentoring the development resources. I have found that if I just let them code, i will get something very naive pu...

How many concurrent projects can a senior developer handle at one time?

I am trying to find sensible resource-allocation models for developers. The department will have many different projects for different external customers, so I need to make some guidelines in order to avoid people getting angry due to lack of focus, not working on things they want to, etc. Currently I have suggestion for a model: Ju...

What is the best way to approach a job shadow when you are the one being shadowed?

I was talking with an acquaintance about his son's plans post-high school and he indicated that his son might be interested in the sort of work I do -- software development. I offered to have him come job shadow me for a day, but it occurs to me that some days might be better than others due to the number of meetings. I'm thinking that ...

What advice can you give to a junior project manager?

What advice can you give to someone who is going to assume a role of software development project manager for the first time? Please list up to 7 things in order of importance and focus on quality and relevance of every piece of advice, rather than overall quantity of tips given. Less than 7 is perfectly OK. ...

Classic programming exercises

I was looking for some good programming exercises for some mentoring. Something like: projecteuler.net: good for the mathematical side but somewhat abstract DNS client: good exercise + concrete technology understanding Sorry for asking this again. I did find this thread but I was hoping for something concrete. Preferably something sm...

How does one avoid becoming a crutch?

Question During my career as a software engineer, I have been both the learner and the mentor, and I have noticed that it can be very easy for the mentor to become a crutch to the learner. Rather than teaching the learner to catch fish for themselves, the mentor ends up doing all the fishing (I think I destroyed that analogy - apologies...

"Mentor" a senior programmer or colleague without insulting

I don't have great social skills. Like many programmers I know, social skills are something that is worked on and developed over time because it's not a natural and 'inborn' trait. When a computer is doing something wrong, you can tell it so and 'fix' it so it'll work correctly the next time. It won't complain. It won't feel insulted...

Where Can a Solo Developer Find Good Mentoring / Code Review Resources?

I recently read this post from several years ago about OR/M. Personally I'm a huge fan of object-relational mapping and in fact, I'm reading Fowler's PoEAA right now in hopes to better understand how to address the problem. But Jeff's post got me to wondering first what Jeff and apparently others know that I don't. I also recently stum...

What is the best analogy to help non-oop developers grok interface based programming?

I'm having a hard time trying to get my team comfortable with interface based programming ... anyone have some suggestions? ...

Do any FASM veterans want to become a mentor?

Learning assembly has so far been pretty hard, I have read every tutorial I could find and I'm still having trouble getting some of the basics down. Does anyone out there want to mentor me and answer a few questions every now and then? Thanks to anyone considering. ...

Tips for Junior Programmers

I'm in a situation where I got a job as a developer and there is no mentor or anything. This is my first software job. I'm 24 and working on a BS in Computer Information Science. I have experimented with some languages on my own time, took some classes, and did a few IT internships and software is definitely the career for me. I didn't l...

A site where users could make suggestion for my code?

Hi do you guys know a site where other programmers could make suggestions about the code that I make? I always think that the code I make could be better and I also wish someone could like mentor me or point out some bad habits that I make. I code in Java. ...

Which books should a programmer read and in which order?

Duplicate of: What is the single most influential book every programmer should read? Hi, recently a very young co-worker asked if I know some articles, blogs or books she could read to become a better programmer. I told her there are reading lists with "Every book a programmer should read". I've seen those lists, I've read some books,...

Final Year MS Project / Enhancement of existing project by collaborative working

I am a final year MS Student and want to do a major project in computer science (preferred langauge is C++) Can you please share project ideas and related pointer for same...? If some one has already done some project and would like to enhance that by collaborative work...do let me know.... ...

most professional way to tell a developer they are no good

What is the most professional way to break it to a developer that they're not very good? I haven't been a developer for as long as some of the others out there. But I have already had to deal with some really crazy people. What is the best way(s) to stay professional and critique a developer who really is horrible at his/her job, kee...

Getting Started - where can you get help coding?

My last post was a monster and it peaved some people so I'll keep this one short. Besides self study in books and google, are there good resources to turn to get guidance from actual humans Online? Say i want to write a piece of software as a project and take a crack at it. It would be great if I could turn somewhere for some mentorsh...

Should I start with Unit testing when teaching a new developer?

I'm currently working on a project that is using technologies like Silverlight, WCF, EnterpriseLibrary, Unity, LinqToSql, NUnit, RhinoMocks in .Net 3.5 I'm training up a new developer who has some experience with VB script and SQL, but no exposure to .Net Almost 100% of the codebase has unit test coverage, but it just seems that gettin...

Mentors for Architects

While reading the activities performed by established solution/software architects, i came to know that many of them are guided by mentor or mentors. So, Did you become an architect by the help of a mentor? What are the activities / tips / methodologies etc etc you learned from your mentor? How you got linked with your mentor? What...