I’ve never really had a technical mentor. What am I missing?
When I was in the gym today, I was listening (as I usually do) to some tech podcasts.
There’s two I mainly follow.
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Casey Muratori’s "Wading through AI"
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Sounds generic, but trust me guys, it’s not.
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It’s a really good, higher level cultural/economic discussion on how AI is impacting tech.
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Wookash Podcast. The topic of this post.
Wookash is a great interviewer, and he typically brings on tech people, and asks them a lot of relevant questions. Things like how they got "good", specific techniques, advice on careers.
But there’s a lot of storytelling too. He interviews a lot of people in the games industry - and there’s a LOT that goes on behind the scenes.
What made me want to write this blogpost was the interview with Marcin Undak.
It’s a good interview. Marcin managed to go from CD Project Red and the Witcher 2 to being engine lead of Diablo 4.
Something that stuck out to me was the discussion around the mentorship and technical assistance Marcin got early in his career.
He had the chance to make big mistakes, to do pair programming - and to have his code reviewed by someone who’s skilled, and who cares.
The way he described it was very intriguing to me. I’ve been thinking of this for a long time.
For one, there’s the famous Mundanity of Excellence paper, which posits that expert-level skill sets can only be built in communities and groups.
There’s also Kenneth Reitz’s Coworking saved my life essay. It’s not about technical mentorship per se, it’s more generally about the opportunity he had as a college dropout to work with intelligent local entrepreneurs.
There’s also countless other podcasts - especially on Wookash’s podcast - when people talk about the benefit of having detailed, one-on-one code reviews and mentorship.
I think about this a lot - because I never had that chance.
When it comes to upskilling - I got good alone. Sure, there were a lot of times when one of my programming clubs would give me good advice, and there were times when I would collaborate in a group - but I got GOOD alone.
The countless hours hunched over my keyboard following courses outside of college, making video games for fun, reading programming books.
I was curious as to HOW getting other people to review my code could improve my work. I’m also curious as to what other people think.
In general, I believe gen Z programmers are unique in that we lived in a time where we could reach competence just by copying stuff online, and gradually improving.
So, even if I did have a technical mentor - I don’t know if they would be able to help me much.
IDK just spitballing here.
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