Project and Tech Mentors

Project and Tech Mentors

• Project Mentor
• Technology Mentor

WHFNP volunteers range in experience from people just learning to code to those with years of industry experience. We are constantly on the lookout for mid-weight to senior volunteers to offer not just their tech skills but their ability to support, encourage and advise others, and to help steer architectural decisions for our non-profit projects.

For mentors, it's a great way to build their leadership skills and it's usually the case that mentors learn a lot back from the experience and those they mentor.

We have defined the following two roles, Project Mentor/Lead and Technology Mentor, which have different responsibilities and commitment levels.

Project Mentor/Lead

Helping define processes, tasks and figuring out the best way to help the project move forward.

• Midweight-senior with industry experience building and deploying projects
• Can have multiple mentors per project, e.g. frontend, backend, UX. The more experienced support for juniors the better
• Available to commit to support the full life-cycle of a project. Commitment levels will be highest at the start of a project and more supportive / on a consultation basis near the end.
• Approximate weekly hours: 2hrs or less depending in how often the team meets. Most teams meet every 2-4 weeks.

Example responsibilities:

• Leading architectural decisions (tech stack)
• Working with the Project Manager to create technical tasks and assign them to team members
• Helping junior volunteers get started on their tasks
• Checking in on progress, and being available for team meetings + consultation / problem-solving for duration of the project

Technology Mentor

Helping the team with technical issues, improving understanding, best practices

• Midweight-senior with industry experience in a particular skill-set(s), e.g. Python/Ruby/JS/all the things, UX analysis, PM, QA, etc
• Available for scheduled 1:1 consultations or responsive to Slack messages (private and in channels) other volunteers
• Approximate weekly hours: 1-2 hrs

Ways to contribute

During workshops

• help volunteers setup their laptop (install python, git etc)
• help volunteers to understand instructions
• help volunteers when things go wrong, help them understand what they could do to fix the issue
• help volunteers find the information they need by googling, guiding volunteers on how to find the information they need in the future themselves and which sources are good to refer to (StackOverflow, official Django docs whichever is appropriate at the time)
• let volunteers make mistakes and help them understand what went wrong and how to go from here

In Slack

• provide advice in Slack channels when consulted
• share best practices, relevant articles and other information to help volunteers learn more about the certain technology you are mentoring
• join in conversation to help decide on a best tool for a specific task
• help volunteers with troubleshooting issues when they post error messages in a channel

Example responsibilities:

• Attend planning meetings when different projects involve topics within mentor's expertise