Written by Finn H
on 

Mentor for a Day | Lessons for life

How can learning from others’ career journeys help us shape our own?

That was the driving question for our last PGP project. The key word of that is “others’”, yep, that’s right. I actually talked to people! (shocker, I know). So, buckle up for the story of how I got to talk to Zach Latta and Graydon Hoare, all in one project!

First, a bit of detail on the project itself. This one was honestly pretty simple as far as projects go with only three main goals1:

  • Find a mentor, or someone to interview.
  • Make questions, and do the interview
  • Write & edit an audio reflection/podcast

Yep, that’s really it! The project started pretty slow, with only one looming goal: To send out emails to people. The first people I decided to reach out to were Graydon Hoare, a software dev who famously created the Rust language, and Zach Latta, founder of Hack Club. I had plans to reach out to more people if they didn’t respond.

To my surprise, my contingency plans weren’t required, as while I initially sent out my emails somewhat late I got a response from both people the same day. Zach was free for a quick phone call, and Graydon could do an email interview2.

Since Zach was only free that day I had to work quickly to finish my questions, polish up everything else, and get myself set up for the call. It still went really well, despite me blundering a bit. I got a lot of good insight and advice, and I got to hear about a lot of really cool things, that really made me hopeful for the future. Most of that I talk about in the podcast — linked below this paragraph — but there are some things that happened more recently that weren’t included. First, right near the end Zach mentioned a worldwide hackathon Hack Club was running called Scrapyard. I’d heard of it, but hadn’t really considered going. He encouraged me to go check it out, and it was a ton of fun. I got to make cool stuff, meet cool people, and it was just a great time overall3. I’m also excited to say I might end up running a you-ship we-ship program for Hack Club soon which is super cool! Anyways, that’s about it for the Zach stuff, again, see the podcast for the rest of the details.

(yeah, it still hasn’t been posted by our teacher, it’ll be here when it is)

Now for the email interview. In my interview with Zach I tried to focus a lot on his story and hack club in general. So, to keep things different, I tried to focus more on Graydon’s mentality and ideas around programming. This meant more questions about inspirations, favourite tools and projects, and open source. I wasn’t too sure how many rounds of email I’d get, so I tried to cover a decent range of topics on the first round. After a bit of fine tuning, this is the final list of questions I sent to Graydon4:

  1. Why and when did you first get into programming, and what are some motivating forces and challenges you've experienced throughout your career?
  2. What are your thoughts on open source? What do you think some of the greatest strengths of open source projects are, and what could serve to be improved?
  3. What are some of your favourite projects, niches, and tools right now? Are there any that you hope become bigger over the next few years?
  4. What are some of your future goals and aspirations, do you have a dream project, is there some past project you want to improve, or are you content with your current state?
  5. .Who are some people that inspire you, what are some qualities that you value in people?

After a few days of waiting, I got back a wonderful response, almost as long as this entire blog post! Each response had multiple paragraphs with great detail, and was a blast to read through5. While I certainly won’t quote the whole email verbatim, I will mention my highlights. In his answer to the question about open source, Graydon (accurately) described open-source as an almost political movement. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before, even though it makes perfect sense. Here he also noted how open-source’s incompatibility with a lot of other groups (as well as some other factors weakening its potential)6.

Another interesting response was to my question about challenges. While he didn’t mention much, one thing he did was remaining focused, and working in the systematic way that programming requires for long periods of time, something I definitely relate to.

In more general terms, hearing about projects and tools was super interesting, and gave me a lot of cool new things to look into. It’s always super interesting to hear what other technical people are interested in, and this was no exception. His list of people he was inspired by ended up focusing on professions and qualities rather than specific people which I didn’t expect, and found really interesting.

Both of the interviews for this project were great, and I’m so grateful for Zach and Graydon for letting me pick their brains for this. I learned a ton doing this, and I have a bunch of new things to think about and try.

Anyways, that’s all for this post. I’m Finn, so long for now.

  1. There was also the “sub-goal” of making a smart brevity note about the general profession we were interested in, but this was mostly to aid in making questions and writing the audio reflection. ↩

  2. Sadly, my mail reader flagged Graydon’s response as spam, so I didn’t see it until a few days later. (It was a reply to a message I sent, how does that make sense) ↩

  3. I actually enjoyed it so much I’m now on the team that organized this in Vancouver, so that’s also pretty cool! ↩

  4. This was also, sadly, the only set of questions I’d get a response to (although considering my delay between replies, that’s still amazing (especially with the quality of the response I received) ↩

  5. I aspire to be able to answer questions this well. This whole experience has also made me want to send out more emails to people I find interesting. I have yet to follow through on this goal. ↩

  6. He also recommended “thinking about what else the world needs beyond just software freedom” which besides being a good quote, is also something I’ve started to try and do more. ↩