I’ve mentored many engineeers throughout my career, either officially or unofficially. These mentorships were always tied to company where I worked. For no other reason than there was no clear way to handle those relationships formally, outside of the work place. Meaning, that when I or the mentee left the company, those mentorships fizzled.
There should be a way to maintain these mentorships, separate from the companies where those involved work. To do this, I’ve been thinking about building an application that could connect people that are looking for mentors, with those seeking help. This app could support multiple technology types — frontend, backend, etc — as well as different languages or technologies — ruby, python, node.js. Additionally, it could support more esoteric things, like career mentorship.
I think the biggest concern that comes to mind, is that people might end up using it as a dating site. Considering that car-share apps have turned into hook-up apps, it’s hard to imagine that anything that connects people wouldn’t be used for that purpose. This could open the app to legal issues.
I’ll think about this more later. Mostly, I’m just trying to get back into the habit of blogging on a regular basis.