[portland] Mentoring Offer

[Howard Abrams]

  Regarding the "mentoring" discussion we've been having, I notice that
  the ePDX has this link for "groups" that use the word mentoring:
  http://epdx.org/groups/tag/mentoring
  
  However, that doesn't seem too helpful. I mean, when I was just
  starting out in this industry, I would loved to have glommed onto a
  gray-haired mentor for advice, but now that I have the gray hair, I'm
  not sure how to help.
  
  On one hand, someone can crowd-source a huge amount of online advice,
  but that information is too general and impersonal. On the other hand,
  the idea of a mentor that gets to know someone well enough to give
  particular advice requires a time investment few of us have. Still,
  this seems like a worth-while idea.
  
  Part of me has thought about creating a site that connects mentors
  with particular experience and mentees with specific interests,
  but I'm not sure how that would come out as little more than
  an odd, dating site.
  
  Yeah, I did sign up on CodeScouts a few months ago, but I think
  everyone there is pretty busy and I haven't heard back, so I'm just
  going to throw out this idea…
  
  If you are interested in grabbing a series of coffees or Skype chats
  with someone who taught himself to program from a TRS-80 manual in
  1980 and has been programming every day since, who learned functional
  programming in Scheme before it was trendy, who's bread and butter has
  been enterprise software and web applications, and who has been
  involved in the Portland Startup Community for 15 years, let me know.

  Howard Abrams
  www.howardism.org
  @howardabrams