I’m a big believer in mentoring. Classes are great, self learning is hugely important, but there are few things that help someone grow as much as having someone a little bit farther down the road to give a little bit of guidance. I’ve been lucky enough throughout my life to have had many mentors in a number of aspects of my career and life. These people have been invaluable.
I’m not the only one. A few months ago Coby Chapple, one of GitHub’s amazing designers, did a talk at a company event about the importance of mentoring, based on the Distributed Mentoring movement. Coby even put his code where his mouth is, adding a page to his personal site stating his support of mentoring and offering to mentor those who put themselves out there and email him. Going a step further he even made it easy for others to follow his lead by forking his mentoring repo creating a mentoring page of your own.
I thought this was a great idea and always meant to follow his lead, but didn’t quite get around to it. Well after setting up this Jekyll site today is finally the day. Feel free to reach out to me. I’m happy to do whatever I can to help folks interested in general security, digital forensics & incident response, development, using GitHub, however I can help.
I urge others, especially in the security community, to consider doing something similar. Information security is still more art than science, and as the security industry gets bigger and bigger we need more experienced folks not just to share their skills with the up and comers, but also to share the ethics and lessons we’ve learned along the way.