Calling all Mentors
Motivation
Hi, I’m Dave and I’m a member of bears-team-25 along with belcurv and rifkegribenes. Our Build-to-Learn project for Chingu-Voyages is called co/ment and it is an app where Mentors and Mentees can find each other.
They say if you want to become an expert at something — teach it to someone else, so I think of this project as adding another stepping stone on your path to the developer mountaintop.
I finished up the freeCodeCamp curriculum in June, and I have been applying (very unsuccessfully) for jobs ever since. While completing that curriculum was really satisfying, it also left a void in my coding life. I wasn’t working, but I didn’t have a roadmap for learning either.
And that’s where the co/ment project really resonates with me, because it dovetails so perfectly with freeCodeCamp and Chingu. Mentoring is the perfect way to level-up after you have a few projects under your belt. Meanwhile, if you’re struggling with some aspect of the curriculum, you can find a mentor here.
The great thing is there’s no test to pass to become a mentor. No matter where you are in your coding journey, you are ahead of some folks, and behind others. Please join us to share what you know — whether it’s that one trick to crop images of cherries into circles, or how to build an isomorphic JavaScript app from scratch. It does not have to be a major time commitment either — if your image-cropping trick only takes an hour to teach, then that can be the extent of your mentoring.
The process
Of course the purpose of the Voyage cohorts was to work as a team and learn new skills, and this project didn’t disappoint.
First of all, you will probably use git/GitHub for version control, and you will probably #@$! it up! But learning how to unravel a commit and resolve merge conflicts are important team coding skills, and there’s something to be said for jumping in the deep end and figuring out how to swim.
Second, you will learn something unexpected from your teammates. belcurv taught me about account validation in mongoDB, but he also showed me through his commits how to write clean, commented code, and to always be looking for ways to be more efficient.
Reading rifkegribenes code taught me about using media queries in SASS, but seeing her commitment to the details of the user experience made me realize how much deeper my own UX work should go. Plus there’s no doubt that you will learn about work ethic and sacrifice and motivation and support. And hey, you will learn some technical things along the way too. We implemented redux middleware for async actions, we handled deep links on our SPA, we implemented a password reset workflow and we crafted beautiful system-generated emails.
Thank you team!
I was on vacation when Chingu Voyage started so my teammates came up with the idea for co/ment, and I am so glad they did. Being part of a project that can give back to the community was a huge motivator. I believe I would have tuned out if the project was cloning another site or building a bot. I also want to give major credit to rifkegribenes for the design of the app. You probably already know about her, but from the moment she showed us the start page, I was eager to contribute just so I could hit refresh and see it load. You’ll want to join our platform just so you can click around and see all the pages! So I invite you to check out co/ment, create a profile and share your unique skills with the Chingu community.
Check out the project here: https://co-ment.glitch.me and please feel free to give feedback, report bugs and most importantly create a profile and contribute!
