Mentoring framework?

[Mason Loring Bliss]

I just wrote about some bugs that nettle me in my "bug bounties" post, sent
just prior to my writing this. I'd like to throw out another idea as well.

In the post I listed a number of things that I'd encountered that bother
me, and in each case I've put some time into trying to either correct or
work around the bugs. Between work and family my time is way more limited
than I'd like, but I'd like to contribute, and something that occurs to me
is the notion of formal mentoring. At work one of my roles involves
mentoring junior engineers. We'll either tackle things they're working on,
wherein I show them how I'd approach the issues they're trying to untangle
and maybe highlight tools and techniques that might be new to them, or I'll
share what I'm doing and narrate my actions and ideas as I work through
puzzles that have landed on my plate. Either way, the end result is that
they end up with more tools and techniques at their disposal, making them
feel more powerful and competent.

This would be a bit heavyweight for a volunteer project, but for FreeBSD, I
can envision folks volunteering as mentors and corresponding via email
about particular projects or bug hunts, or occasionally via IRC or
somesuch. The underlying idea is that a hands-on donation of time from the
folks in the mentoring role would be enough to energize folks like me to
the point where bugs get fixed and the mentees start building up momentum
on their own.

As an example, for the bug I noted where a platform won't reliably boot the
kernel, or for the bug that came up on the list a week or two ago where
Vultr VMs hang on reboot, a mentor might help identify data collection
tools and techniques and some idea of how to determine if a line of inquiry
is producing usable results, after which the mentee could dig in with some
notion of the short-term goal for the current stage of the investigation.

I'd love thoughts and opinions.

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss          mason at blisses.org          Ewige Blumenkraft!
awake ? sleep : random() & 2 ? dream : sleep; -- Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
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