How to find a mentor, a developer who can guide us.

[atishaybaid]

I'm an angular and JS developer. I've been building projects with them for past 6-7 months. I like web development and especially JS very much. I need someone who can guide me through the different technologies, tools, projects, and even career. How should I find and ask someone to mentor me. I work for a company which doesn't have many senior developers.

[kentcdodds]

I would recommend checking out CareerDean. It's a pretty cool platform and people are answering questions all the time. That's a good place to get some help guiding your through your career.

For guides through tech, tools, and projects, I would recommend you get active on Twitter, IRC, Gitter, StackOverflow, and Slack. There are great communities of people out there for chatting it up about technologies.

Also, I recommend you attend meetups as often as possible. Networking with other developers is crucial in my opinion. I meet with a lot of developers who know more than I do and I ask them questions and listen to what they have to say.

When I started my career, I had a bunch of awesome developers at Domo who were my mentors (more info in #1). Now, I work at a company where I'm the most senior frontend developer. So now, the community is my mentor.

Also, training websites are quite helpful and many are free. Sites like egghead.io, Udacity, Code School, and Pluralsight are fantastic resources.

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Now, if you want to specifically ask someone to be your mentor, you need to assume that they are super busy (just like everyone else). But don't let that make you afraid to ask them. Most people genuinely want to help, and they'll be flattered you're asking. Just make sure that you're not asking more work from them than you're willing to put in yourself. In my opinion, a good mentorship situation is one in which the mentee (you) create and work on a project and the mentor reviews the project and provides you feedback. They could also give you guidance as to which tools to look into or start out with.

That actually sounds a lot like what Udacity does. I recommend you give that a look :-)

Good luck!

[atishaybaid]

thanks a lot man.................:)