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 CET. 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 anyone 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 enroll in a vocational school, to save money mostly. I had zero faith in our country’s 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!