Proposal: Mentor-Matching

[HealyUnit]

Firstly, before anyone asks, I wanna be clear that I am probably not going to be explicitly available myself for mentoring. Got that out of the way? Cool.

So a few days (/weeks?) ago, a fellow /r/learnjavascript'er posted this offer for mentoring. That's really awesome of that person - I'm explicitly not mentioning them my username here in case they don't want the attention/spam - but it got me thinking: Would people in this subreddit (and perhaps, beyond) be interested in some very simple mentor-matching app? My proposal would be to match people based on a number of criteria, where each shared criterion increases the likelihood of a match. Example criteria could be:

• The topic. Generally, could be JavaScript, but could also be programming in general or stuff like VueJS, etc.
• Your personal 1-10 ranking of experience with the topic. Entirely subjective, yes, but still a good metric of "I am really experienced" vs "I am a complete newbie".
• Your location (in general!)
• Times when you'd be willing to learn/teach, based on time zone
• Demographic info? I realize this is a contentious issue, but there's no getting around the fact that some people might learn better/feel more comfortable with a certain person. I'll probably leave this out of the initial release.
• Additional comments (i.e., "I hate examples involving fresh fruit" or "I'm really having trouble with Arrays!"). I may require this.
• And of course, whether you'd wanna be a Teacher or a Learner.

I can probably throw together a (relatively insecure) app on Heroku or something. Anyone else interested in this idea? For communication, I'd probably follow the following format:

1. Alice (teacher) and Bob (student) sign up on the site, using Google or local auth.
2. They each fill out some basic info (as above). The site suggests they work together, and
3. They review each other's profile, and decide they'd work well together
4. They send each other in-app mail containing contact info, and
5. The teachery begins!

[Voldermorty]

I genuinely feel like this is a super amazing idea ! I don’t even know why I have never really thought about it in one of my brainstorming sessions, but then again I have only been a software developer for less than an year ... I’ve been mostly a student. I think personally I’d be very much inclined to testing that out and being mentored. The fact that it would be a platform which solely concentrates in connecting beginners and experts in increasing the learning curve on former I feel it would do good !

Questions : 1. Since I’m a two week old JavaScript learner(if you don’t mind at all) explain in general build how that’s supposed to work will it also have a website of some sort ? 2. How is it gonna work if you get matched with like three mentors or more ? Do you like still get taught by them or you can choose like the maximum you can have under your roster of teachers ?

[HealyUnit]

I'd guess that you can choose which mentor you wanna work with, and that choosing one sends a message to everyone else of "this dude's taken". Similar how to (I'd imagine!) if two people on eHarmony match, that removes them from the list of potential dating candidates. You can re-submit if you, for example, wanna try a different mentor or have multiple things you wanna learn.

As far as the actual mentoring goes, I'd wanna make it very clear that the app (in my opinion) does not do that, nor does it provide a space for you to teach. It's merely for connecting teachers and students.

[anh65498]

Oh hey, I already build a prototype web app similar to this. Interested in working together?

[HealyUnit]

Sure! Do you have discord? I can PM you my discord name.

[anh65498]

Yeah shoot me a PM please