Ever been a PHP mentor/mentee?

phpentrepreneur

I'm often called upon to work with junior PHP devs to introduce them to Good Coding Ideas - everything from design patterns and coding style to security and scalability concerns. I've picked this stuff up myself over several years and from several people. It's making me think: is it worth formalising this kind of mentor/mentee relationship? If someone had given me some 'expert guidance' periodically I'm sure I would have learnt faster. I think self-help books and forums are great, but consistent help from one person would have been invaluable.

Does anyone have any experience of this kind of arrangement?

johanafm

One idea that springs to mind is code reviews. There is only so much you can teach a person up front. The rest has to come from experience and repetitive use. Code quality should improve and over time they will write better code from the start.

The tricky part may be getting management to see the point of "doing the same work once again with a group of people that one person did in the first place"...

rulian

There is such a practice called paired programming or something like that.
Where it is basically two people working on the same computer, same code at the same time.
One codes the other observes and checks for errors things of that nature. It is said to increase efficiency and reduce errors, plus you can pair a strong programmer with a not so strong programmer so the more experienced one can supervise.