Padawan and Master - Mentoring Developers

Good Star Wars themed talk on mentoring and apprencticeship. The talk itself was good, the Q&A was excellent.

Good Star Wars themed talk on mentoring and apprencticeship. The talk itself was good, the Q&A was excellent.

The talk spent a little too much time early on on definitions, but the last half had a great payoff. I really enjoyed the personal experiences section.

I really enjoyed Elizabeth's talk. This subject is a great contribution to the conference.

the topic inspired a lot of good interaction at the end. also, star wars.

The topic of mentoring - or really, any interpersonal topic - is one too often ignored at conferences. This talk was very helpful to me as I am now expected to start mentoring some of the new hires at my company.

The talk did drag a bit in the beginning but it sure paid off in the end. Excellent information during the talk itself and truly fantastic answers for the questioned posed afterward.

I really enjoyed this session. I came in expecting to learn skills for mentoring others (which I did) but I also learned a lot of things that are missing in my development as well.

Really liked this talk. The only thing I would suggest is to echo Seth's comments on more time sharing stories and experiences. Loved the hair :)

I really enjoyed the talk. The Star Wars references were very entertaining. There were several points where I found myself laughing about them.

The leadup in the beginning was good, the experiences at the end was great, and the QA was fantastic. You did well inspiring us to go out and help others.

The talk was very entertaining, and Liz is a very good speaker with a great way of expressing her ideas. My four rating is a result of the fact that I'd like to have heard more about the actual setting up of a mentorship - especially more formal ones - and how that should be approached, discussed, and specific examples of conditions/provisions to include. Additionally, I was hoping to hear more about how to specifically handle guiding a padawan technically - that is, how do you guide someone to "getting" that crazy way of doing X? We discussed this briefly during Q&A, but I was hoping to see it in the main talk.

Lastly, I want to thank Liz for discussing a topic which she was obviously very experienced in and had emotional attachment to. It made the talk more "real", more like we were seeing right into her experience, not hearing about it second hand. Liz, don't think that is a weakness of your talk, it is not.

Was hoping for a magic solution to make my trainees follow instructions better but alas, there is no magic. Loved the hair. As mentioned in a different post, speaker misused "then" (in slides) which drove the Grammar Nazi in me nuts.

Good talk, particularly for those of us (me) that aren't great at teaching novices. I got a lot of good advice out of it, though I would've preferred toning down some of the Star Wars references.

Elizabeth is a great presenter and this talk had lots of great advice and details. I'll refer to her slides often. She's a strong proponent (and practitioner) of "giving back" to the PHP community, so hopefully a lot more people will have a chance to see this talk.