Cloud Native Mentorship: Tips for Being a Great Mentor to CNCF Students
summary
Mentorship focuses on concrete practices: define explicit goals and ask each student what they want to learn, run weekly check‑ins (even if brief), timebox deep debugging, and split work into small, reviewable PRs so you can merge often. Use retrospectives after each program and share notes across maintainers to multiply feedback (the team reports moving from single‑project learning to 5x or more by aggregating lessons), plan backups when tasks are too easy or impossibly hard, and expect long reviews for big refactors.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:30Who am I
- 2:55Why does it matter
- 4:05Set your goals
- 4:55Ask yourself this question
- 6:20Ask for what you want
- 6:48The goal of the project
- 7:54Backup plans
- 9:07Feedback loops
- 9:51Retrospectives
- 10:20Learning
- 11:07Sharing retrospectives
- 12:03How to get more feedback
- 12:55How can we learn faster
- 13:54Meetings
- 15:41Transparency
- 17:46Goals
- 18:02Timebox
- 19:01Feedback
- 19:37Merge frequently
- 20:35Collaboration
- 21:31Conclusion
- 21:51Questions
- 23:36Strategies
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