Finding a Mentor & Contributing to Open Source
One of the great things about being public with my career transition is that people are more open with me about their own career transition aspirations and challenges. So recently I’ve engaged in conversations about how someone should go about finding a great mentor or how one would go about becoming involved in open source. Based on my experience, both seem to be related in the following three ways:
- Goal Setting
You shouldn’t set out with the goal of “finding a great mentor” just like you shouldn’t attempt to just “contribute to an open source project”. Both of those are mechanical things that should help you achieve something you’re passionate about. So start with the ultimate goal in mind. Asking 5 whys might help you articulate the core motivation (or pain point) better. So, why do you want have a great mentor? Or, why do you want to contribute to open source?
In my recent conversations this introspective questioning usually lead to goals around career building by either gaining experience via advice from experts or working along their side to further hone skills while increasing personal visibility. Finding or exploiting passion featured strongly, too. Both mentorship and open source contribution address our core needs of learning, progressing, and connecting.
2. Finding the Right Mentor or Open Source Project
Don’t boil the ocean but rather engage with immediate and nearby opportunities. While it’s certainly a big world out there with virtually endless possibilities, there are plenty of interesting things happening within your first degree network. Successful engineers teams’ greatest new talent source is internal recommendations. You’ll be positively surprised how many great people you know, just take some time to write down the list. You can then decorate this list with topics the person is strongly passionate and knowledgeable about. Look through the list and see what resonates with your passions and ultimate goals. Chances are if you engage your contacts on topics of mutual passion, they’ll take time to let you know how you can be helpful to their cause while sharing their experience with you. Similarly, before getting into that big and important open source project you deeply care about, you might want to take a look at something simple you use every day and figure out how to be helpful by submitting a suggestion (pull request) for making it better.
3. Engaging with a mentor or with open source
Networking and interacting with a potential mentor (who is by definition busy) is similar to starting a relationship with a thriving open source project — they don’t have much time for new people. Just like you wouldn’t expect that your first pull request be incorporated into something as core as Linux kernel scheduler, you can’t expect your potential mentor to respond to a cold email about taking time to connect. It always helps to be introduced through a friend but mostly you’ll still need to put in a lot of effort showing interest, smarts, ambition, and ultimately usefulness as you gain increasing access and trust.
Please share your experiences in finding mentors or contributing to open source.
