Mentoring: Change the World One Hour at a Time

Great talk Beth!

Considering this is the first time you're giving this talk, I think you did it like a pro. You've offered some great insight.

My only suggestion might be to offer a little more personal experience on how you've come by some of this insight.

Thank you!

Told me lots of things about mentoring that I didn't expect! Mentoring in php/web-dev has a lot of specifics that I wouldn't have imagined. But I can tell that they're wise.

It's clear she's an involved mentor and/or mentee/"apprentice".

Friendly and engaging / engaged speaker. Clear she cares about what she's talking about.

Really great practical advice for mentoring and setting expectations in the relationship. Also very seamless and smooth delivery. Great job! :)

For future talks, I would love to hear some real-world success stories from the PHP community and an example of a failed/problematic mentoring relationship & why. I'd also love to hear about the perspective of both being a mentor and apprentice at the same time.

Beth's presentation did a great job of defining mentorship from both the Mentor's and the Apprentice's POV. It was a very simple and clear guide for how to start and manage a mentoring relationship. I especially liked the extra time at the end of the session for a Q&A.

Great talk, especially given it was the first time you've given it! It seemed like the main content was finished rather quickly but it left a lot of opportunity for discussion so I think it worked nicely.

In the case that you don't get questions, it might be interesting to have another 10-15 minutes planned to talk about your own personal experiences. I did feel like I wanted to hear more about that during the talk. It came up in the questions so that was nice. Maybe that will just naturally happen every time?

Well done! I feel like I need to regroup with my apprentice and reevaluate our plan and see if we can tweak some things. :)

It's refreshing to hear a talk about mentoring. The tech community has a terrible tendency to say "RTFM" and expect that everyone can easily pick up new technology X just by reading about it. If we all took a little time to help each other out, the community would be better for it.

Good talk, the content covered provided a great foundation for starting as an apprentice and mentor. The talk really came to life during the Q&A section.

If I was to give feedback, and not in terms of speaking poorly of your talk... Once you hit questions and answers, is when your personality really shined. You could tell you were much more comfortable and passionate. I think that energy could be felt and the engagement with the audience was great. In comparison with the slides, your energy wasn't equal and felt to me as you were simply reading them. If I was to make a suggestion, tie some personal stories and experiences to each of your slides. Once you started answering questions and speaking on your personal experience, it drew everyone in. I think that marriage of personal experience with slides will make your presentation even strong.

Way to power through the cough!

Great talk. Specifically I love the idea of people being both mentor and apprentice, no matter where they are in their career. I actually liked that it ended early to allow for discussion. Very well done Beth. Keep giving this talk.

It's great to have a mentor and be a mentor at the same time. Sharing knowledge through mentorship is a bit like open sourcing. I believe both the mentor and mentored benefit. Great presentation!

This talk seemed very well-prepared and flowed very nicely. Beth's passion for the subject shined through, and she provided many good insights. There were great discussions at the end too. I would have liked to hear about more about specific success stories from the community related to mentoring.

This was one of my favorite presentations at the conference. Beth provided a terrific roadmap to developers at all paths in their careers to continue their learning experience through mentorship, either as an apprentice or a mentor. With a robust list of resources at hand, such as where to sign up for a mentor or apprentice, podcasts to check out, and places to go to get involved in the community, this talk offered up a nearly definitive guide on how to get started. Although a bit shorter than some of the other talks at the conference (I agree with other attendees who said the talk would benefit from more anecdotes from personal experience), I thought it inspired a lot of robust discussion and conversation, which was wonderful to see. Thank you!

Great talk. I really liked how you approached it from both sides, and laid out how it should work for both parties. To me that's made it better. I liked the addition of the resources slide so that we can go to some follow/homework.

One of the best soft talks I've ever been at. As a person with mentor/apprentice-like relationships this helped clarified some bits of the process that I've been missing and could use to improve my success both as a mentor and as a student.