Ask HN: How do I find a mentor?

You could start by putting some contact information in your profile - a web page, your location, that sort of thing.

Contact people on YC that are already planted in areas you want to be involved in. Add an email and website to your profile. Tweet. Create a "brand" of yourself. Soon, hopefully people will start knowing who you are.

That's what I'm doing right now, anyways. I'll tell you how it is going a month from now.

Forget user groups. Forget craigslist. Forget the internet.

1. Do stuff: Pick up projects. Do open source work. Volunteer.

2. Network: Meet people in person.

"Finding a mentor" is a misnomer. You don't "find" a mentor any more than you find a girlfriend or spouse. A relationship with someone who can mentor you is the byproduct of everything else you do. Get out there and get busy. You may be surprised at the people who take an interest in you and your work.

If I were you I'd try to use my cross domain knowledge (a pilot!) to position myself in a niche where there are few competitors, I have a hard time imagining there would be a lot of people that can call themselves programmer/pilot (though on HN for sure we have a few). That seems to be your unique selling point, so try to get as much traction there by recycling your old skills for as much as they're worth.

As for mentors, that's easy: Ask! (the specific person). If you're turned down find another one until you have what you're looking for.

A bit of an introduction wouldn't hurt, and those people here that have their email addresses listed do so because they don't mind being contacted, otherwise why else would they do that?

If you want some help getting started with Java, I'm willing to give you some pointers so you can feel confident developing web applications.

I can be found on gary-rowe.com.

You're at a disadvantage compared to the nerds who have been sitting behind a computer since they're 8 years old.

Instead of competing with them, try to use your background in aviation to wedge yourself into the software business. I suggest researching lots of smaller companies that make aviation-related software. Everything from aircraft systems to websites for pilots, iPhone applications related to aviation, tools for GA pilots, etc. There may be people out there who would love to have a software enthusiast pilot on staff, or consulting.

I work in flight simulation, and one very interesting job I've seen people do is test pilot / test engineer. Your combined background could make you a great candidate for that sort of role too. There are a dozen simulator manufacturers around the world, mostly in US, to look up.

I agree with a lot of advice here, especially those that point out that your own initiative is most important, but I would recommend my site: http://everymentor.com/ A lot of folks around Hacker News are probably aware of it (because I bring it up in almost every thread.. :-) but you might get lucky and snag someone that is interested in working with you.

I find it rather funny that there was just a submission two days ago answering precisely that question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1708777

Gabriel Weinbergg (@yegg) just wrote an awesome post about this

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-get-that-...

This is veru useful advice - http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-get-that-...

At this point in time, I would suggest joining the Apple Mac/iOS community. A macbook + iPod touch + developer subscription will get you access to a great community, loads of iTunes U videos about CS and programming from Stanford and other great schools. The community is pretty great compared to others. You have a system where you can learn all aspects of contemporary software development, from scripting languages, to web sites, to handheld/mobile development, GPU development, systems administration, and so forth. You will also be developing a particular skill set that is highly in demand for employers, and one in which you can start immediately making money on your own selling apps. The unix and scripting language skills are also transferable to most other UNIX jobs, if you need to find work.

I've not always been a Mac/iOS dev, but this is now the advice I give to newbies, including my own brother.

Great question. First, don't look for a mentor. Rather, start networking and let the mentorship relationship develop naturally rather than artificially.

I work for a big internet company (not bragging) and they paid people up between groups which historically fails... Why? Because it's artificially, there's nothing there.

There was a similar thread in HN long ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670453) and an awesome comment from 'plinkplonk' on this subject (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670795).

Let github be your mentor and try to find someone to write/share/debug/review code with.

Now that you've done some basic programming in C++ and Java, you are in a little bit better position to figure out what kind of programming you want to be doing.

The C family is a language used in corporations for programming applications that we use all the time. Objective C is what it used on iPhone/iPad/iWhatever applications. C is also big in the video game industry.

Java is also used by corporations to develop applications, but it is also used to develop web sites. If you want to use java to build websites there are tons of choices to make about what to learn. Here are some words to research: Tomcat, Spring MVC, Hibernate, Ibatis, GWT. Java is a very heavy weight language, but probably the most commonly used today.

C# is Microsofts answer to Java. Also used in the corporate world, not as popular as java.

Then there are the web programming language: PHP, Ruby, Python. PHP is strictly web programming, while Ruby and Python are used for other things as well. Ruby has a web stack known as Rails, commonly referred to as Ruby on Rails. Python has a web stack known as Django.

If you are programming in C or java, and not on the web then you will be spending lots of time looking at text. If you are programming for the web, you will also need to learn HTML, CSS, and javascript, as well as a javascript library like jQuery and you will be spending lots of your time looking at the browser and lining things up.

You will also probably need to learn SQL at some point, though that can wait if you are programming for the web (Web developer) and probably cannot wait if you are programming off the web.

I come from a web background myself, and would say the easiest place to start, if you want to program for the web, would probably be Ruby on Rails. Learn Rails before learning Ruby. This is an excellent resource:

http://railstutorial.org/

Hope this helps some!

Facebook has puzzles page. Facebook may hire you, if you can solve their puzzles. I don't work at Facebook and am posting it from their website.

http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php

Just a thought, if you are learning to program anyway, why not try to solve FB puzzles. You may have the job by the time you are done learning.

I did worked at Singapore Airlines and was building Crew Management And Rostering System for pilots. To maintain international flying license, pilots have to fly each and every country once a year and they also have to get retrained in different emergency landing scenarios. As a Pilot, you may know so many problems pilots face due to such stressful environment. You may be able to build meaningful application which can help ease those problems.

Don't learn C++ as a starter language. C++ and Java are languages that have been mostly evolved from C. C was designed as a convenience tool to replace stack based assembler programming, which is what existed before any of these languages were available. So if you learn C++ first, you will have hard time understanding why there classes, why there is protection, why there are member fields, why inheritence ... the whys will be an endless list and you will never figure it out. If you wanna get that far, buy the C progamming language book and learn C first. In C you will get to understand the roots.

To fast forward and save you some time in programming, learn python. It has all the bells and whistles, and its simple to program.

Read this guy's essay: http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

If I were you I would either write a simple program that you think aviation people might need, or taking the employment path I would go for an aviation related software company like one doing flight simulators.

Decide what you want to program before finding a mentor, even though some mentors might help you find a language to specialize in rather than just teaching you a small part of what they know and how they think.

If you want to be more involved in web side of things and getting dynamic website stuff (forms, etc. etc.) done quickly, go the PhP or Ruby on Rails route.

If you want to have a job almost anywhere, do Java. With Java you could be doing anything from server-side, embedded code in chips, to Android apps, to web applications (dynamic websites).

If you want to have a job with almost as good of a chance as knowing Java, learn C#/.Net. You can cover the Microsoft side of the virtual world.

If you like utility, crazy looking slashes and text manipulation, learn Perl.

Want to write software that runs a lot of the faster stuff, operating systems, things that allow Java, Ruby, C#, Perl, etc. to run, software that runs devices, etc., learn C and C++.

There are many more options as well. Try to choose something that fits where you want to be, not just something easy.

I agree with those who say you should find a programming job that showcases your pilot's knowledge. That will provide you with the greatest chance of success. Find out the type of programming that Boeing, etc. need, and do that. Odds are, it is C/C++ or Java. Or check out Flight sim companies. These two might be interesting: http://www.prepar3d.com/ or http://www.cascadegamefoundry.com/

The main thing to know is that if you've not dome much regular programming before, it will be fairly hard. Do not give up, it gets easier with practice. Keep at it. Look at some recent open source projects and go through the code. Set yourself some programming tasks and complete them. Do this regularly. All the best.

Introductions are everything.

A program like YCombinator or TechStars is a giant boost up for exactly that reason. But if you have to start at the bottom, the process is exactly the same... just longer.

It's like that guy who traded one red paperclip for something better (and better) over and over again until he had a house. Find the 10 smartest people you know, make friends, do something for them, and then ask them to do something for you: "Introduce me to two other smart people like you". Before you know it, you'll have some mentors. And if you keep it up, you'll get better and better mentors.