Best Practices

Tips and Tricks for graduates and mentors starting a Fellowship group

The main goals for this program are:

• To give HYF graduates an opportunity to gain ‘real-world’ working experience by working with experienced web developers.
• To support HYF graduates in the building of a portfolio project to be added to their CV (and impress prospective employers!)
• To enable Fellowship Mentors to further develop/practice their leadership & coaching abilities and create a positive impact on society by helping others.

Learning objectives for trainees:

• Get further accustomed to meetings, stand-ups, and code reviews/feedback.
• Practice English and online collaboration.
• Revise and implement concepts learned throughout the program. For more information, check our curriculum.

Project length:

• Aim at having an MVP from the project within 4 weeks from the start. After the MVP is live, further development can be done to improve the application. For that 2-4 additional weeks can be added.

Dedication:

• Graduates from HackYourFuture are to spend a minimum of 20 hours a week dedicated to this Fellowship project. The more, the better.
• Fellows mentoring graduates from HYF commit to 2-4 hours of mentoring per week (depending on availability and amount of mentors in the team)

Trainees' Best Practices:

We ask graduates to make the most out of this practice. Show proactivity and exceed expectations. Ask your mentors to review your code, to give you feedback on how you communicate, to help you plan the best way to approach the practice, etc. Remember that when you are working on a company YOU are responsible for your performance so don’t expect the mentors to ‘push you’ or be there to keep you accountable. Also:

• Be on top of your planning and take an active role in working and asking for mentoring so you end up with a better project and increase your learnings (and odds to be hired afterwards).
• Remember that your mentor volunteers for this practice because he/she wants to do so, so DON'T BE SHY AND ASK FOR HELP AND GUIDANCE! If the mentor is too busy at any given time, they will let you know.
• At the end of the 4-week practice, mentors might give you a performance review. Look below at the Performance Review Criteria to understand what are the things employers usually evaluate your performance on.

Mentoring Best Practices:

We ask mentors to take an active mentoring role in this practice. That means, do not wait until the graduate has questions but instead challenge him/her to do their best week after week. Expect and motivate proactivity and good performance. Think of the graduates on your team as new interns at your company. Give constructive feedback especially when it is difficult. Also:

• Keep in mind that most of our graduates haven’t worked on a tech team before so they have (and want) a lot to learn. Do be empathic and understand they are not senior developers though.
• Plan weekly meetings to set goals and deliverables and to review the work done. This will help trainees improve their planning and use their weeks as effectively as possible.
• Make yourself available to answer questions and be clear on when and how you are able to do so. We can set up a Slack group for you all to manage communication easily.
• Learning how to write clean code requires not only practice but also guidance. Do code reviews regularly/weekly. Use this as an opportunity to point out best practices. During HackYourFuture, all our code reviews are done directly on GitHub so our graduates are also used to that. Here an example on how we do it.
• Mistakes are going to be made, so be sure you show those mistakes as they are part of learning.
• Allow graduates to make mistakes before you tell them the “right” way. Instead of telling them how to do something, try to help them figure it out by themselves. This will help improve their ability to logically work through a problem and increase their learning ability. As John Crosby has rightly said: “Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction”.
• If you feel the work or communication with the graduates is not going as you would expect, please communicate with the HackYourFuture team. For us it is very important to have an idea on how the trainee's development is going so that we can better help them find a job which is HackYourFuture’s ultimate objective.
• After the first MVP (4 weeks or practice) we recommend giving a quick / written performance review to each of the graduates to provide them with feedback on how they performed in the past 4 weeks and how they can improve moving forward. Below we share some criteria on how to do this and here you can find a template to make your job easier. Once the Performance Review is ready, please share it with the graduates over a call (to answer any questions they might have) and also with the HYF team so we can keep involved in our graduates performance and help them better to find a job or internship as soon as possible. Here you can find a link to the performance review template.

Performance Review Criteria:

Note that this information is just for reference. If you have a better way of doing this feel free to follow it and if you think we as the HYF team can improve on this or any other part of the program, please let us know!

• Code Quality: Does the graduate have a good coding style and write efficient, performant and maintainable code? Does he/she apply the suggested feedback in time and push code often?
• Communication: Does the graduate communicate clearly with both colleagues and mentors? Do they reply to feedback constructively? Are they active in the work?
• Responsibility and proactivity: Are they actively driving the project forward? Are they on time for meetings? Are they actively looking for ways to improve themselves and the MVP?

Here you can find a link to the performance review template.

Some questions to discuss on the kickoff meeting:

• What's going to be the dedication (in time) from mentors and graduates? Having clear expectations here on both sides will increase the performance of the collaboration.
• How are you going to define the idea further? Make mockups, etc? Who will manage this? Here is a cool resource to take a look at.
• How often should the code be pushed? Will there be code reviews? When/how?
• How will the communication between the grads and the mentors go? When and where can grads ask questions?
• How will you define/track tasks? GitHub Board? Trello?
• …

Project end (for graduates):

We ask you graduates and mentors to be sure that the application is live and deployed at the end of the practice so we can share it with our community and motivate other trainees. Additionally, we ask graduates to make a film showing the app and sharing their experience and learning. If you have questions about this reach out to us!

Fellowship Examples:

SRDEV Journal: Code | Demo

Elastic Newsfeed: Code | Demo

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This guide is work in progress. If you have suggestions on how to improve it, please submit a PR or connect with Federico Fusco to share and discuss your ideas. They will be more than welcome and appreciated!