I am excited to announce that I’ve been selected as one of the first mentees for the new Arlington Ruby mentorship program! There is a lot of informal mentoring that goes on in Ruby communities which is really amazing, but sometimes it’s really difficult to get a mentor. Sure, there are lots of people you can ask questions to but having a more formal mentor is different. Knowing that time and dedication are required also makes it more difficult to ask someone to commit to you in that way. It involves both the mentor and mentee developing goals for what they want to learn and both people are invested in the relationship and progress.

Arlington Ruby has recently formalized their mentorship program. The goal of the program is not just to connect new programmers with experienced ones and it is not to just benefit the two people involved. The program involves peer mentoring and a lot of thought into how the mentors and mentees will additionally contribute to the rest of the community. You can check out the official guidelines here. In the meantime, I’m super excited to have Chris Sexton as my mentor!! For the next six months, I’ll ask him hundreds and hundreds of questions (he may not know what he’s gotten himself into) and I’m looking forward to developing some goals and posting about my progress and what we work on here.

Thanks Arlington Ruby for putting some serious thought into how to continue to make the Ruby community even better. Hopefully other Ruby groups will copy this format and it’ll become a way to build stronger local communities for all of us.