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Mentorship
10 posts about Mentorship. Every summary links to the original.
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From Curiosity to Impact: Inside the MongoDB Intern Experience
MongoDB’s internship program provides a multi-layered support network including team mentors, inclusion guides, and early talent program advisors. Interns work on real, impactful projects: Aashcharya built and tested AI agents to automate platform support, Cristina created an open-source Python binding for Atlas Local to simplify AI development, Maria built an end-to-end energy industry solution, and Tyler tackled a storage challenge to make the storage layer more flexible. Mentors teach that revision is part of the job, not a failure, and that taking ownership and earning buy-in are critical skills. Community events such as welcome lunches, bowling outings, and bagel-making classes help interns connect with peers and leadership, including an impromptu AMA with the CMO. Interns leave with improved communication, openness to feedback, and an understanding of sustainable work practices.
Engineering Management
The post presents an engineering-leadership perspective on how the author incepted and grew Ramp’s Core Engineering team from zero to 50+ engineers, while noting that the guidance is shaped by a company under Dunbar’s number. It defines an engineering manager’s role as unblocking reports, appreciating their contributions with technical depth, and helping them advance through the leveling deck. The central leadership practice is “pay attention”: build a coherent organizational model, maintain consistent direction, understand motivations, and avoid feedback that misses important tradeoffs. Core Engineering favored hiring individual-contributor engineers and moving some gradually into management after testing their aptitude. The post also presents one-on-ones as a way to build organizational context, and describes slow growth, intern mentorship, and prompt dispute resolution as forms of compounding management quality.
Technical Mentorship Reimagined: Time-bound and No Awkward Asks Necessary
Shopify’s Engineering Mentorship Program was created to give developers a structured way to pursue technical and leadership growth alongside the company’s existing just-in-time collaboration. Survey findings indicated that developers wanted to learn from colleagues but struggled to make dedicated time, motivating a recurring program designed around those constraints. Each six-week cycle uses voluntary sign-up, automated matching based on expertise, reporting relationships, and job level, weekly one-hour meetings, goal setting, Slack support, and an optional guidebook. The time-bound format lets participants try a mentorship relationship without an open-ended commitment, while mentors also practice teaching and leadership; by 2020, more than 300 developers had participated as mentees and more than 200 as mentors, 98% of survey respondents said they would recommend it, and demand exceeded available mentor capacity.
Dev Degree: Behind the Scenes
Dev Degree is Shopify’s work-integrated learning program, designed to combine an accredited computer science degree with four years of continuous developer experience. Students take three university courses per semester while working 25 hours weekly, beginning with Shopify-led skills training before moving through four team placements across disciplines such as back-end, front-end, data, security, and production engineering. The program teaches tools and technologies including Git and GitHub, Ruby, Rails, React, TypeScript, and GraphQL, while emphasizing mentorship, feedback, personal development, and support from a multidisciplinary team working with university partners. The first cohort graduated on April 24, 2020, after adapting to program changes and remote learning during the pandemic; the post reports that 100% of graduates accepted full-time positions within six months.
Pair Programming Explained
Pair Programming Explained presents pair programming as two people writing, debugging, or exploring code together, while explaining why Shopify uses it for knowledge sharing, collective ownership, learning, quality, and onboarding. It defines terms including problem, solution, driver, navigator, expert, novice, and disengagement, and stresses that the driver handles implementation while the navigator guides broader strategy and spots errors. Guidance covers when to pair, the trade-offs among expert-expert, expert-novice, and novice-novice combinations, and the risks of “watch the master” or disengagement. Suggested practices include switching roles with the Pomodoro Technique, using Strong Style or Digging for Gold, and holding a retrospective to discuss flow, learning, and tension. The article presents pairing as a focused collaborative practice that benefits from shared attention, regular breaks, and deliberate communication rather than an unstructured coding session.
Meet Shopify Developer Kirsten Westeinde - Shopify
Kirsten Westeinde’s just-over-five-year Shopify career spans internal tools, partner-facing applications, and backend development on Kit as the company scaled. She began with Ruby on Rails, later helped extract partner software from Shopify Core using Elasticsearch, Kafka, Ruby on Rails, and the Shopify API, and now works with Data Engineering on real-time recommendations. The feature combines Go and Ruby and is designed to handle the current load while scaling to future demand. Her problem-solving practices include whiteboarding system interactions, taking mental breaks, and writing or explaining ideas to align collaborators. She also describes mentorship, pair programming, a women’s developer meetup, and f(empower) as ways to support growth and address exclusion, bias, and microaggressions in technology.
Shopify Devs Share Lessons on Self-Advocacy and Dealing with Adversity - Shopify
Shopify’s Behind The Code series profiles Stella Lee, Helen Lin, and Cathryn, three developers discussing self-advocacy, adversity, management, inclusion, and career changes in technology. Lee describes building Shopify Checkout Experience features in TypeScript and Ruby to reduce manual checkout fields, while leading the f(empower) women’s employee resource group; she also discusses imposter syndrome, mentorship, and turning initial “stupid” questions into better ones through timeboxing and research. Lin, a remote Themes team lead, emphasizes aligning projects with long-term company vision, managing stakeholders, staying connected, and directly requesting career opportunities while sharing accomplishments. Cathryn recounts moving from health sciences into programming and stresses evaluating personal goals, hiring a more diverse workforce, and using meeting-room paper pyramids to support inclusive discussion. The article closes with advice to embrace feedback and own both accomplishments and failures.
Dev Degree
Dev Degree is Shopify’s work-integrated learning program, combining an accredited university degree with double the experience of a traditional co-op. It emerged from concerns that graduates often knew theory but lacked practical software-development skills, and it required a long-term partnership with a university willing to change curriculum and assessments. At Carleton, students take three courses each semester while working 25 hours weekly at Shopify; students also complete a first-year Developer Skills Training program, submit practicum reports every four months, and receive technical and Life@Shopify mentors. The program allocates at least 20% of degree credits to practicums and uses learning outcomes influenced by ACM and IEEE Computer Society standards. Shopify reports 95% retention, women representing over 50% of students, and students becoming productive after nine months; it has expanded to York University, while the company says broader adoption is needed.
Accelerating Android Talent Through Community Bootcamps
Shopify created Android Bootcamp to address its need for mobile talent while giving local developers an entry point into Android development. The two-day workshop targeted people with at least one year of development experience, especially newcomers to Canada, and taught participants to build a simple quiz app. The curriculum covered XML-defined views, Android lifecycles, MVC, JSON parsing, libraries, and remote data fetching, with six Shopify mentors supporting one primary teacher. After screening 33 applications, the team accepted 14 people—seven men and seven women—and received positive feedback, although participants found the room too small. Shopify reported 100% overall happiness, one attendee later joined full-time, another was set to join in May, and a second bootcamp was being planned for June.
How We Enable Our Interns to Make an Impact
Shopify describes an internship model in which interns work on projects affecting merchants, partners, and developers, including merchant pain points such as selling across channels. The program combines autonomy comparable to that of full-time employees with mentorship, regular pair programming, unfamiliar challenges, and cross-team collaboration. Examples include launching the Amazon Channel, changing an Android app design pattern across multiple codebases while limiting effects on third-party developers, backfilling affiliate data with Elasticsearch and Ruby on Rails, and generating Java and Swift models from a strongly typed GraphQL schema. Interns are encouraged to investigate open-ended problems, consult documentation and stakeholders, and develop informed recommendations with mentor support. Returning interns can change teams or roles, while tools such as Slack enable direct communication across the organization; the stated result is practical experience, deeper technical knowledge, and potential full-time opportunities.
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