Hi, I'm pleased to report that the 1:1 hacker mentoring program seems to be going well. I was slightly disappointed around this time last year when it turned out that only about half of the mentor-mentee relationships had worked out, and several mentors were not interested in continuing to mentor. However, in year two, about three quarters of the mentoring relationships seem to have worked out and are still ongoing. Personally, I think that's quite good; stuff like this is never going to be a hundred percent. For those people interested in the statistics, we currently have about 10-12 people being mentored by 9-10 committers, and the use of ranges is because some situations are a little bit fuzzy. Several of the existing mentors have told me that the are potentially interested in taking on new mentees, and it's also possible that some committers who are not currently mentoring will take an interest, so I anticipate being able to add some new people to the program this year, which is fantastic.
That brings me to the main purpose of this email, which is to provide a signup form for anyone who is interested in being mentored as a PostgreSQL developer by a PostgreSQL committer: https://forms.gle/43Ftkznrp7fwqtFW7 Please keep in mind that, while anybody can fill out the form, this is really intended for people who are already active on this mailing list as developers and are looking to commit significant time to hacking in the future, perhaps with the goal of becoming committers eventually themselves. If you are not already active on this mailing list, it's still possible that someone will agree to mentor you, but it is not as likely, and you may also not get as much out of it. Also, it's been my general observation that mentor-mentee relationships typically work out best when there's overlap between the mentor and mentee in terms of what they're working on, so please do put some careful effort into describing your current work and areas of interest. Also note that whatever you write in this form will be shared with potential mentors to help them decide whether they want to mentor you. If there's something you want to share just with me and not have shared with potential mentors, please send me a private email or a Discord message about that. I will leave this form open for responses until March 15th. Then, I'll start contacting potential committer-mentors and see who is interested in mentoring whom, and I'll email everyone who applied to either let them know that I was able to find a committer who is willing to mentor them, or that I was not. Thanks very much to all the mentors who have made this program possible, and to the mentees for their participation in this program and in the broader activity of hacking on PostgreSQL! -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
