2 Years as a Codementor

The last two years have been amazing. Codementor and my mentees were part of making them so. Here's why. 👀

2015 when the year when Praveen Kumar and Suresh Atta—two Indian friends I met on Stack Overflow—made me aware that I can start teaching people how to code.

I've been skeptical in the beginning, but it turned out to be good. Today is the day when I reached 1000 sessions, 666 reviews and 888 ratings on Codementor. 🎉

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Some of those requests were easy, others quite challenging. Some sessions were very short (e.g. 3 minutes), others took me up to 6-7 hours.

I learned so many things; sometimes doing it the hard way (yes, we all know that hour estimations are difficult and tricky!!! 💥). Thanks to my mentees, I found useful JavaScript libraries (such as SweetAlert), nice tools (e.g. Mergely), cute platforms (e.g. Firebase) and more. Uh, and I strengthened my PHP knowledge! 😂

One special thing I like about Codementor is the flexibility to work wherever, whenever and how much I want.

I tried to not make the place a blocker issue, instead to value it: on a hill, or between the hills using an improvised & experimental technology (aka antenna—but literally a long stick of wood brought from the forest to put my iPhone on top of it 😇) to get a little bit of signal from the cell tower... 🗼

...or even climbing a tree and having an experimental session with a mentee who had just signed up (I did warn him that I'm going to test that—if my iPhone can sit on a tree, why couldn't I?!). During the session he added his coworker in the call—I'm sure it was purely for job-related reasons. 😀 It turned out his coworker's grandpa was from my country. We were so happy!

...or sitting on the grass and being surrounded by a crowd of sheep coming from nowhere

...or explaining pieces of code waiting to cross the road on the congested streets of New Delhi—in fact, waiting for what?!

During my trip to India, after traveling together with Bhargav (btw, he's good in React) I, finally, met Suresh. I'm still in awe of Indian hospitality! 🙏

I realized that Codementor does provide a great way for mentors and mentees to work together, but it's more than that: it connects people on so many levels. People from different parts of the world, with different backgrounds and cultures. Real people. Real people you can meet.

Scripture tells us: Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning. (Proverbs 9:9). Learning is a lifelong an eternal process. Mentor and mentee are in the end just titles. They are interchangeable. A mentor will learn a lot of things from these beautiful people.

Previously, I've written about The Joy of Being a Mentor. Also, you may want to check out this map with my mentees. 📝

If you'll ever need help with something I can do, let me know!

Thanks for making Codementor amazing! 💖