Mentoring and onboarding new engineers is one of the most important things you can do to grow your team. Effective and intentional mentoring decreases the number of bugs shipped to production, improves the quality of your application, and helps keep code standards high as your team grows and changes.

Yet for all of its importance, we hardly talk about how to mentor effectively. There are many resources about how we can provide productivity gains by learning about new language features or tools , but there are hardly any about how they can get 400% productivity gains for their team by helping other devopsers be be more productive.

In this talk, I’ll discuss how to think about mentoring new djangonauts from the ground-up. First, we’ll discuss how to structure a plan for your mentee such that they move from “What’s CI?” to “Let’s use build out a new continuous deployment pipeline on top of Kubernetes and define the whole thing in terraform” in no-time flat. Next, we’ll talk about how to interact with your mentee such that every challenge helps them level-up their development skills and helps reinforce your team’s culture. Before closing, we’ll shift the spotlight over to you and show you how your time mentoring can help you level up your own engineering skills as well.