--- title: "Mentorship" description: "6 posts about Mentorship, summarised, each linking to the original." --- # Mentorship > 6 posts about Mentorship, summarised, each linking to the original. ## Articles ### [Engineering Management](https://yomu.fyi/post/engineering-management.md) - Company: [Ramp](https://yomu.fyi/company/ramp.md) - Author: Patrick Anderson - Published: Nov 11, 2023 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](https://yomu.fyi/post/technical-mentorship-reimagined-time-bound-and-no-awkward-asks-necessa.md) - Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md) - Author: 2023-10-18 - Published: Feb 10, 2021 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](https://yomu.fyi/post/dev-degree-behind-the-scenes.md) - Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md) - Author: 2023-10-18 - Published: May 13, 2020 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](https://yomu.fyi/post/pair-programming-explained.md) - Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md) - Author: 2023-10-18 - Published: May 9, 2019 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](https://yomu.fyi/post/meet-shopify-developer-kirsten-westeinde-shopify.md) - Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md) - Author: 2023-10-18 - Published: Mar 22, 2019 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](https://yomu.fyi/post/shopify-devs-share-lessons-on-self-advocacy-and-dealing-with-adversity.md) - Company: [Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify.md) - Author: 2023-10-18 - Published: Mar 8, 2019 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.