As many of you know from past posts, I was recently awarded Chris Sexton from the Arlington Ruby group as my mentor. I say awarded because it’s been going really great and I think he’s awesome. I’m so glad Chris is my mentor and we’ve been meeting regularly to make sure I’m learning what I want to. This brings me to my next point, as many of you also know, I think it is very important to set goals. In addition to setting goals for myself so that I can achieve them, goal setting is a vital part of a mentor/mentee relationship. Part of being an effective mentee (I’m going to do a full post about this in the near future) is making it easy for someone to mentor you by being proactive and knowing what you want to learn and accomplish.

One of the first things I did, before chris and I even had a chance to sit down for our first meeting, was let him know what my goals were during this time period. These goals have already changed once or twice and I can always continue to add new goals as we go along, but providing Chris with my goals sets us up for success. I know I’m going to learn a lot and he knows exactly what I want to focus on to learn.

Here are the goals I sent him:
- Pair program at least once per month
- Determine projects to work on (building off of what I have already done and building new things)
- Feel more comfortable with defining my abilities
- Feel comfortable with looking at/thinking about projects that are in progress (not just building rails apps from scratch)
- Learn more about databases and become more comfortable working with them
- Determine how to set good programming goals (there's so much to learn, how do you determine what gets you to the next level and how to get there)
- Commit to OSS

I’ve already started my first project with him of building a bot! The bot is going to be awesome and we’re going to incorporate some information that needs to go into a database in order for me to really get a better sense of working with databases, how they work, and what problems might arise when using them. I’ll definitely be doing some posts soon on the process of building a bot.