The other day when I was preparing for my offline session with Hack Your Future students, I noticed that I am not getting a lot of mentorship requests in ADPList. I thought it might be because of the timing. I had only set aside some time on Sunday nights to do this. To remedy this situation I have created some slots every weekday around 17:00-18:00. I am at the office around that time waiting for off-peak hours to start so why not? You can find those slots in the website but I also made a booking page on my Google calendar for this. Please check it out if you need to be mentored in Front-end engineering.
However, another thought had hit me when I was checking out ADPList. It feels like I stopped getting mentorship requests around the time when ADP started their paid mentorship feature. While I certainly hope this is not the case, I can't help but wonder if ADP is optimizing on payment potential. This is not, of course, a criticism of ADP. It is a great platform and I am sure a lot of people benefit from it paid or otherwise. But I would very much like to keep my services free on the platform. This is because one of my cornerstones is giving back and I strongly believe knowledge should be free.
How did I develop such strong feelings? Well I owe everything I am to being able to freely learn anything I want from the internet. I am shooting myself in the foot here by writing about this but my journey in programming started with a pirated book. I, in no way, support piracy-- please don't get me wrong. This post is not an endorsement of infringing intellectual property. But Bangladesh is not known for its strong intellectual rights protection. And any one who wants a book just goes to Nilkhet. When I told my dad I wanted to learn Python during my post-SSC break, he got me a pirated book from Wiley. I spent a lot of time with that book. It taught me programming fundamentals. How would my programming journey go, had it not been so accessible to get this book?
I was strongly against my parents sending me to private university. I wanted to enrol in a vocational school, to save money most. I had zero faith in our countries education system. And I was not wrong. The university curriculum was vastly lacking in what I knew was standard in the industry. Had I not been working in the industry at the time, my career prospects would have been much worse.. By the time I got a job in Cefalo, one of Bangladesh’s best software companies, my parents could no longer force me to stay in school. I dropped out two years into uni. It had nothing to do with me getting this job. I owe most of my success to Kyle Simpson and Eric Elliott. Kyle's YDKJS taught me the fundamentals of JavaScript. I had not bought his books, rather borrowed them. I am already trying to fix that mistake by gifting some of my students the books. On the other hand, all the blog posts that I read from Eric Elliott were the fundamentals of my coding standard. One of my colleagues in Cefalo pointed out that I got the job because I wrote unit tests-- something engrained in me by Eric. Unfortunately, I could never afford his paid mentorship. Where would my career have been if I had had that opportunity? I wonder.
All of this and more has made me always want to give back to the community. This is why I volunteer at conferences. This is why I volunteer at Hack Your Future. And this is why I have just signed up for DIVD(Partially, of course, there is firstly a duty as a Security apprentice and then the potential to kickstart my career in Security). I am incredibly indebted to the community. This is why I would always like to freely give back. I understand the effort it takes to create and publish content. I know it can incentivise quality content and many other things. But I personally believe that we need not gatekeep our knowledge and experience with a paywall. To that end— I would like to announce a video course I am planning to work on. Free-- based off of Hack Your Future syllabus. I would like to understand the pains of producing content and put my time where my mount is. Stay tuned!
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