Hello Airflow Community, TL;DR; I am looking for a (volunteer) co-mentor to join me in mentoring 2 Fellows from Major League Hacking Spring 2024. From the past experiences, I know it's a very important thing to have two co-mentors, because that allows them to share the (small) extra load and be responsive regardless of temporary personal issues and the load of a single mentor.
If you are potentially interested - read on for more details. # What am I asking for ? If you would like to join me in being a co-mentor - feel free to reach out to me personally. We have time till 10th of January to fill a form that will help MLH to choose and assign the right Fellows, so ideally finding a co-mentor till the end of next week would be perfect. The MLH Spring 2024 Fellowship starts 29th of Jan 2023 and will last ~ 12 weeks (so ends ~ end of April) . I also have quite some experience in mentoring - so I am happy to mentor new mentors who would like to try but do not know what they are signing up for :). Also reach out on slack if you are not sure, Happy to answer any questions. # What do you get from it as mentor? Mostly fame and glory (but also abilitiy to lead advancement of something you want to do in Airflow by having someone who will work on it). It's also an opportunity to help others to grow and - what I find most important is to learn from the less experienced, new community members. I've learned a lot from all past mentees. The mentor <-> mentee relationship works both ways. It's an opportunity also to exercise your empathy but sometimes also assertiveness, and sometimes even assertivness to be able to tell someone they are probably not well fit for the project after trying to get things working long enough. It can sometimes involve hard conversations but if you like opennes and transparency - even if it is hard sometimes, this is the right thing to do. And when things work out, it gets very rewarding seeing the mentees are growing (see success stories below). # Some more context and information: MLH asked us to participate in Fall 2023 but I personally had no capacity to commit to it - however I missed mentoring and internship long enough (After two successful Outreachy internships) that I reserved some of my time to mentor the fellows from MLH this year. We have not worked with MLH yet but it seems they know what they are doing, they offer quite a bit of help and "mentoring the mentors" and they have sponsors who are happy to sponsor two fellows to do an internship for Airflow. Also the fellows are going to be already pretty experienced developers who know Python and should be capable of implementing tasks mostly on their own following our regular contribution process. # What mentoring is about? - finding the right-sized (small-ish) projects for the interns to complete and few lead-up issues that will let them familiarise with the area - setting up the mentees for success - i.e. mentor them and help them to contribute in the "usual" way - helping the mentees to succeed - i.e. guiding them in the right direction, help them when they struggle - both when it comes to Airflow internals as well (and that might be more important) with communication/contribution issues - the Spring Fellowship for # Projects for Airflow I have not yet proposed the topics - the topics depend on the co-mentor as we both should be able to help the mentees in their work and guide them if they need help. This is also an opportunity to accomplish something that you want to get in Airflow but have no time to complete it yourself/focus mainly on something else. And we have an opportunity to bring in aspiring people who might bring a lot of value long-term for the community. # Examples and success stories from the past There are past examples of successful projects we've done with such internships. From my experience it's a very rewarding (but also mentally quite a bit demanding from mentor) experience and we've had quite a few successes in the past with our mentees - including several of them being able to advance their careers in IT - at least partially thanks to their internship with Airflow. We've had notably Kamil BreguĊa, Kaxil, Elad as mentors and a number of others who helped our interns to succeed. * Airflow REST API -> was done as the first Outreachy Internship with Ephraim being one of the interns (and now PMC, Committer, full-time employed in Open Source/Airflow) * Improving Developer/Contributor Documentation - with Google Season of Docs where Elena - Technical Writer - helped us to restructure and improve the docs for contributors. I keep in touch with Elena from time to time - she is now leading a team of Tech Writers. * Rewriting Breeze in Python - some people might remember that Breeze has been originally implemented in Bash (:scream:) by me. During the Outreachy internship with Edith and Bowrna we rewrote Breeze to Python (and it helped us to make it much easier to maintain and evolve). Both Bowrna and Edith got jobs related to Open-Source, Bowrna continues to contribute to Airflow pretty regularly. Also - you can find more information about MLH Fellowship here: https://fellowship.mlh.io/ Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested. J. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
